The holiday season is alive and kicking, and you need to prepare now before it’s too late. As the days get shorter, expect your schedule to get jam packed with back to back holidays. Jump on the bandwagon and make sure you benefit from this increased traffic and merriment in the holiday season. Black Friday and Christmas are all excellent opportunities to find new customers of your store.
In this blog post, we’ll talk about the different ways you can use a mix of both offline and online holiday marketing strategies to achieve your goals.
Start with a Marketing Plan
Time and resources come in finite doses, so you need to manage both to make the best of the season. When creating a marketing plan, keep the nature of your store and your audience in mind. For example, if you’re running an online store, you’ll be interested in online advertising as opposed to local advertisements.
If you have a physical store, decorating your storefront, using flyers and collaborating with a local charity would be higher up on your priority list.
You need to know your audience intimately to ensure that you’re targeting the right channels, using the right language and offering the correct products to gain their interest. We’ve done a complete blog post outlining how you can find your audience.
Make a Holiday Gift Guide
Here’s a little thing that can ease up the customer journey – a holiday gift guide! When entering a store, your customer has a vague idea of the gift they want to purchase. They know who to get the gift for, but not the what. That’s where your list comes in. Your holiday gift guide can give gift suggestions for:
- Husbands
- Wives
- Friends
- Parents
- Children
… And you can create further lists based on specific interests. For example, gift suggestions for your nerdy teenage daughter, your mother who’s into crochet or a child who loves Batman.
Holiday guides can be made in a variety of ways, including an email series, or a listicle on your blog, or both. Browse online to see what your competitors are doing and make a gift guide that works well with your product line-up.
Decorate your Storefront
Your storefront is the first thing customers will see, sometimes even from a mile away. It should pique their interest and welcome them at the same time. There’s no single correct way of decorating a storefront and you can either go full maximalist by displaying all kinds of products, or try a more methodical form of decor. What’s important is realizing that:
- Your theme should be made obvious, via visuals associated with the holiday (such as Santa hats for Christmas)
- It should look good. Get creatives on board to fix your storefront up. A professional hand can make all the difference.
- Design banners and display posters that offer a sale or a chance to win a lucky draw with you around the venue. PosterMyWall offers you the means to create stunning advertisements for your store’s Christmas promotions, and offers great quality and value for your buck.
Keep Employees Happy
A no-brainer, and one that may seem irrelevant to the seasonal buzz. Happy employees matter the whole year around and especially during the holidays because they’ll be spending more time at the store when they could otherwise be spending time with their family. When a satisfied employee markets your brand, it will always be well received because it’s genuine.
Not sure what your employees want? Ask them! You’d be surprised what they have to say and you may even discover interesting new ideas to try while you’re at it.
Run Facebook Ads
In 2018, Facebook changed its news feed algorithm to prioritize showing content shared and created by friends over Facebook pages. This means less than 2% of people who’ve liked your Facebook page will see your posts.
The only way left to actually reach users is Facebook ads. The great thing about Facebook Ads is that it allows you to pinpoint your audience, so if you have an avatar for the perfect customer in mind, you can find and target ads specifically to those people.
Creating a Facebook ad is pretty easy. With the Facebook Ad text limit rule, text content isn’t a big issue, especially when you have great visuals on the ad. Finding visuals can be a drag, but with PosterMyWall’s Facebook ad templates, all you need to do is replace text content, and you’re good to go.
Curate Content on Instagram
Having an aesthetically pleasing Instagram page can get you the right customers, and it won’t cost you an arm and a leg to maintain content. You can do product series for your content, which creates anticipation, helps customers find what they want and makes your page look good. Take a look at what Zara displays their apparel with a nice clean look.
While you’re at it, it’s an absolute necessity to set up shoppable posts on your Instagram page. The first step is to get Instagram Business, then use this guide to set up shoppable posts.
Shoppable posts allow you to add price tags to your Instagram posts, and these allow customers to easily interact and go to the relevant product pages via Instagram.
And that’s not all! More than 500 million people interact with Instagram stories, and you can join the action by creating your own, fun Instagram stories. And there’s a ton of creative things you can do with Instagram stories. Instagram stories are great because they:
- Opens up direct communication links between the brand and customers, which is just not there with most content marketing methods.
- Instagram stories are ephemeral content, so you can experiment and be a little casual with your tone.
Instagram stories are casual, and target towards a younger audience. Accordingly, design options for stories change dramatically, where successful brands always go for a clean, modern look. Designing an Instagram story is easy work, especially when you have the right template to customize.
Always Stay on Brand
We’ve laid out examples of many successful brands with a visual look that suits them. Chances are, that look is not for you. Finding your brand voice is by no means easy, but it’s not impossible either.
The first step to knowing your brand is realizing your logo. If you don’t have a logo yet, PosterMyWall offers a fresh range of logo designs for every business, including yours. Just pick a template, add your brand’s touch, save and download.
Once your logo is ready, you can move on to creating actual promotional content that layouts out a sale or a new product announcement. Use your logo to add your brand’s touch to the advertisement. For all kinds of retail promotion designs, PosterMyWall offers a dedicated space for Christmas themed retail templates, perfect for online promotions.
Here’s a Christmas themed template you can easily personalize with your brand’s logo, offer, preferred fonts and graphic placement.
Create Urgency with Ads
Correct language use can make a bland looking ad interesting. Instill urgency in your customers by announcing a limited time offer, making sure the due date is made obvious. You want customers to make an impulse buy, and adding a date like ‘12/24/2019’ just won’t do the trick. Instead, say 2 days or 48 hours left.
Dates often appear vague, and a better approach is to use a visible time frame such as the number of days or hours remaining. This method works best on social media, because your audience can track the post in real time. You can pile on by producing subsequent posts to remind your audience of the timed sale.
And while you’re at it, you want to make sure your ads get noticed. For that, you need to create high quality ads and flyers, such as PosterMyWall’s retail templates. With these templates, you can end up with a professional ad without the need to hire a professional graphic designer, or create an ad from scratch. Instead, PosterMyWall does most of the job, and all you need to do is fit your images and text content.
Over to You
We’ve talked about a whole lot of ways you can improve your marketing through a variety of techniques. Now it’s your turn to give it a try and see what works best for your store and your audience.
