November and December are a wonderful time for marketers. Customers reach into their pockets for their loved ones and often purchase goods and services in a way that they otherwise wouldn’t have throughout the year. This is why business savvy companies look to develop holiday season themed specials and content in order to best capitalize on this time of year.
Here we’ve composed 6 marketing strategies that your B2C firm can look to implement this holiday season.
1. Encourage User-Generated Content
Encouraging user-generated content can allow you to share the holiday season experience that your customers are having with your brand. One great example is to promote the use of holiday season related hashtags in Instagram posts. You can also prompt your audience to send you any related photos, via these tags, and you can pin them to your Pinterest board and create a collage. This also offers you a way to run a photo related contest.
2. Curate Related News Stories
With the holiday season comes a whole set of related news stories. These are topical, fresh, and likely to be talked about between friends and family when they get together in the holiday season. Capitalize on this by following news stories and curating events to your audience, particularly if it is industry relevant. You can set up notifications in Google Alerts or use a tool like Hootsuite or Feedly to curate the content all in one place.
3. Promote Holiday Specials
Holiday specials seem like an obvious marketing strategy to look to. But what’s a little less obvious is the reason they work. Customers are conditioned to think that with the holidays comes special and discounts, even if the margin is still great for you (and hopefully it is). By pitching a product special as ending after December, you can generate urgency in your client base and boost your holiday sales.
4. Create a Holiday Catalogue and Buying Guide
This is a great way to promote any specials you may have. When you have one primary product, say for example shoes, you can use an infographic buying guide to help your customers make a decision as to which shoe is going to be best for them. A digital catalogue also helps them make buying decisions before they get to the store, or even buy online if this is an offer you have.
5. Partner with a Charity or Cause
It’s always good to give back, and what better time to do so than during the holidays. The right cause can get people to rally together when they’re less focused on the general stresses that come a long with day-to-day life. You can also have your charity or course cross-promote to help bring your brand to the attention of a wider audience.
6. Introduce New Products
The holidays are the perfect time to release any new products you’ve been working on. You can pitch the product for when people will have more free time during the holidays to use it; this is great for products that people may believe they are too busy to make use of during the rest of the year. Make sure your launch plan includes a countdown and consistent build up in order to keep your customers checking back for a release date.
These 6 strategies are sure to kick start your marketing efforts this holiday season. Do you have any successful B2C holiday marketing tactics? Let us know in the comments.
About Digital Impact Agency
Digital Impact Agency is a creative firm specializing in interactive media and inbound marketing strategies for manufacturing and technology companies, professional service firms (architectural, engineering, construction, legal and consulting), nonprofits and enterprise companies. We are a team of innovative entrepreneurs focused on creating the most strategic and effective communication channels for our clients.
