The holiday marketing season is here and retailers and marketers are gearing up marketing and advertising campaigns for the holidays to improve retail sales. Each season offers new opportunities to improve existing marketing tactics and add new strategies to increase retail sales during the holiday season.
As a retail business, have you started with your holiday campaigns yet? Preparing to launch marketing campaigns for the holiday season should involve a more comprehensive approach these days. A retailer or marketer should ask themselves how much of a budget is available for the next couple months, understand what customers are paying attention too, deploy multiple marketing and advertising campaigns such as SEO, SMM, Content Marketing, and Paid Advertising.
In addition, retailers and marketers should focus on existing customers and their key customers. Rewarding existing customers with holiday cards, thank you gifts, and shopping incentives can drastically improve retail sales during the holiday season. To further improve retail sales during the holidays, here are 5 holiday marketing tactics and tips.
5 Holiday Marketing Tactics To Improve Retail Sales
1. Create Product Catalogs
Most retailers show their products on their website. Maybe share some of the product line across social media channels, but there are many more options. To improve sales during holidays, retailers can create accounts with a vast amount of image, video, and content sharing websites. Instagram for example is a well known website for sharing product images and creating entire catalogs online. There are dozens of great websites for marketing products online during the holidays. Retailers should create product catalogs across many of these websites. This would also help SEO efforts and increase website traffic.
2. Setup Cross-Marketing
Companies that wish to improve retail sales during the holidays should consider cross marketing. Pairing with other e-commerce websites to cross-market can increase exposure, traffic, and sales. With these types of partnerships, retailers can reach a much wider audience and generate additional sales during the holidays. Retailers can contact industry specific websites that specialize in selling those types of products. Online retailers often purchase products from brands and resell them online through their websites. There are many different types of cross-marketing opportunities that retailers can take advantage off during the holiday marketing season.
3. Social Media Paid Advertising
Paid media can be very expansive, but it is also very effective. Merchants targeting local audiences or national specific niche customers for many products can use social media platforms such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and YouTube to attract new customers during the holiday season. By offering eye catching incentives such as product discounts, specials, free samples, and free shipping, retailers can get the attention of potential new customers on social media channels. By creating ads with incentives and deploying paid advertising campaigns on social media channels, retailers can improve retail sales during the holiday season.
4. Create Seasonal Content
Retailers should create lots of seasonal content, publish it and distribute it through various channels. Seasonal content can be anything relative to the individual holidays that are shopping holiday such as Thanksgiving with Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and so on. Merchants and retailers that have company blogs can blog about gift ideas, gifting tips, most popular gifts for him and her, and other topics. Social media should be utilized to create seasonal content similar to blogging but can include offers as well. Other image sharing websites and video such as YouTube can be utilized as well. Content can be images, video, and text that is created, published across many channels, and shared.
5. Contests and Giveaways
During the holiday season, contests and giveaways can be an effective marketing strategy to increase retail sales online and in physical stores. To boost conversion rates and motivate holiday audiences, retailers can create contests, inviting users to participate by submitting information, videos, and photos to win. Holiday giveaway prices should also reinforce the holiday sales numbers by attracting additional customers and consumers, who are attracted by the giveaway. Creating holiday related contests and offering giveaways to existing customers and consumers’ increases exposure, interaction, and purchases for retailers.
