What's Up

The 2020 holiday season presents both a real challenge and a tremendous opportunity for marketers. Make sure you are prepared to take advantage of what the season sends your way, and if you aren’t Torapath is!

1. Email Marketing is Your Best Friend

We already know that email is a consistent top performer when it comes to driving return on investment (ROI), but the channel also lends itself well to the particular challenges and opportunities presented by the 2020 holiday season.

Email allows you to reach your audience in very little time, which gives you the ability to adapt to trends, take advantage of opportunities, and appeal to exactly what your audience needs. Start off by scheduling out emails at high buying intervals and times when your competitors aren’t advertising as much.

2. Social Media Marketing

The holidays and new year are a great time to boost your social media strategy. People are looking on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter for gift ideas and great deals.

With the right social media marketing strategy, you can boost holiday sales, upcoming inventory, and ultimately engage with potential customers with a relevant message. Social media is one of the best ways for businesses to boost sales this holiday season.

Using polls of Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook are greats ways to get your audience engaged with your brand and will also give you insight on which products are popular, how the consumer thinks about your brand, and how many people are actively looking at your social media pages.

Considering many people are not leaving their houses unless it is necessary, Facebook Live has never been more relevant. Hosting a Facebook Live to answer questions about shipping, products, or the company can help create a customer for life. If the customer sees how much effort you put into your brand and the people supporting you, they will be more inclined to make a purchase from you. Creating events and running giveaways give the customers incentives to join your live videos.

Instagram stories are also a great way to highlight top-selling products. The Instagram algorithm doesn’t show users posts unless the user actively engages with the page. However, with Instagram stories, the user will see more of your story posts which lead to your feed posts getting seen.

3. Search Engine Marketing

According to Google, 4 out of 5 customers use search engines to search for local information including store address, hours, directions and product availability.

Keywords and phrases trend up and down with changes to current events, time of day/year, and the holidays. Obviously, keywords relating to major holidays spike around the time of that holiday. For instance, “Christmas gift ideas,” “best Halloween costumes,” and “romantic Valentine’s date ideas.” The thing is, if you want to rank for holiday-related content, you must plan for this well ahead of time and get your content published prior to the holiday’s buying season. Using Google Trends,you can track the trends of the year and find keywords that align with your company’s brand and products.

Increase your chances of showing up in the search results and make your site more relevant by targeting holiday-related keywords in your content, images, and reviews. For instance, if you have any reviews that mention the holiday season, highlight these comments. If you are creating content, include holiday-themed images with alt-tags that include words such as “gift,” “Christmas,” “giving,” etc. Since search engines can’t “see” your images, alt tags help web crawlers understand what the image is about for better ranking results.