How to Prepare your Business for The Holiday Season
Are you all set for this year’s Holiday Season? No, not the ‘on a beach with a Martini’ kind of holiday - Are you ready to rock the biggest and most important period of the year for marketers and advertisers? ‘Not yet’ is often the answer, but it should be a definite ‘Yes!’. To help you get there, this blog will walk you through some important Holiday Season points and what to expect in the upcoming months!
Angelina Natividad
Online Marketer at The Next Ad
Holiday shopping – you either love it, or you don’t.
Whatever your stance may be, there’s no way of getting out of it. Consumers are looking to find the most perfect of special gifts for their loved ones and are going to great lengths to do so.
More than ever are people browsing for ideas, doing research on potential items and hunting for the best deals.
This means that advertisers and marketers must make it their top priority to ensure a pleasant and seamless customer experience along every step of the way.
And with an increasing amount of consumers starting their holiday shopping in as early as October, it’s obvious to see why you need to start prepping your Holiday Season game plan right away!
Why You Should Care
Words alone might not convince you to take action right away, but these impressive numbers should!
Customers' Journey - Your Success
This shouldn’t come as a shocker anymore, but people are spending a lot of time online on their mobile devices. This constant availability and accessibility to information, communication and platforms have changed the expectations and behaviour of consumers quite a bit.
Focussing on optimising the customer journey has become a vital activity for businesses, as people are expecting effortless shopping experiences throughout all parts of their journey. Therefore, solely advertising on one platform is no longer sufficient as consumers now bounce between multiple devices and channels, further elaborating their purchasing paths.
One may start off searching for ‘Best Christmas Presents for Brothers’ on Google, and end up buying (online or in-store) a set of headphones three weeks later after being retargeting with Facebook and Instagram ads and after reading a ton of reviews.
If this experience was disturbed by the lack of relevant content or promotions, online presence or allocated budget, businesses could needlessly lose out on many valuable conversions! To prevent this from happening, marketers and advertisers should start prepping their strategies as soon as August already! Here’s how you do it:
How to prep for the Holiday Season
Facebook and Google have recently published great and extensive holiday guides with many useful tips and tricks to get you through this year’s festivities. Since it might be a bit too much to go through everything, here are some steps you’ll need to take to prep your Holiday Season game plan!
Make sure all your tech is working correctly
It’s important to check whether your websites or webshops are functioning right and be sure to have installed all the necessary tools, plugins and integrations in time! Place a Facebook Pixel on your site, make sure you’re able to measure the success of your activities with an Analytics platform that is connected to your site correctly and check the performance of your site in terms of speed, mobile-friendliness, user experience, etc.
Partner up with a certified Facebook Marketing or Google Premier Partner
You don’t have to do everything alone – better yet, teaming up with an expert might be the best thing to do! And it doesn’t have to be expensive either, at The Next Ad you can leverage the platform and support of a certified Facebook Marketing and Google Premier Partner from as low as €99,- a month!
Partners can help you with things such as ad creations, optimising, managing and automating social ad campaigns, tracking your campaign performances and much more! Therefore, investing some time into finding the right partner for you is definitely not a luxury.
Know your audience and what they want
If you don’t know who you’re working with, you won’t know what to do. So, be sure to create a clear picture of who you are trying to reach and how you are going to do this. Once you’ve done this, it’s important to analyse what you have and distinguish audience segments. You could use data from last year’s campaigns or based on information collected from page visitors to set up effective retargeting campaigns that cater to your audiences’ specific interests.
Test, test, test
This should be no surprise, but testing your ads based on their performance is crucial! Find out what works best for you. Create different kinds of ad creatives, try out multiple ad formats or channels and perform A/B tests to find your winning formula.
What to expect in the upcoming months
Great, so we’ve gone through some of the steps you can take to prepare for this year’s Holiday Season. But it doesn’t stop here, of course. In the next few months, The Next Ad will help you get through this exciting period by posting weekly blogs that’ll be focused on discussing everything you need to know and need to do.
We’ll put out content for the more advanced marketers and advertisers, but also for those who’ve just started with digital advertising. Look forward to blogs with more tips and tricks, strategies and expert advice! If you don’t want to miss a single blog, feel free to subscribe to our newsletters and receive updates and content twice a month!
Have you already taken some steps to get ready for this year’s Holiday Season or is this your first time reading about it? What are some things you would like to learn more about? We’d love to know, so let us know in the comments below!
