As the "slow" season comes to an end and the busiest time of the year quickly approaches, there is one lingering question all businesses must answer - are you ready for the holiday season? For most, the answer is a resounding "hell no". But fear not, because there is no better time to start planning than now! In this blog, I’ve dished my top five essential tips and strategies to ensure your business thrives during the holiday period.

5 Tips to Help You Nail the Holiday Season

#1. Focus on SEO:

If search traffic is an important part of your marketing strategy, then you’re going to want to get going on optimising for those seasonal keywords. SEO isn’t an overnight quick-win play, it takes time to yield results. Starting today will help you get that head start for ranking come December. So it’s time to dig in - do some research and identify the relevant keywords that your customers typically search for during the holiday season and incorporate them strategically into your website’s content. Think blog posts, updating page titles and meta titles, and maybe even a helpful holidays freebie to pull in that traffic.

CTA Graphics [Not Public]

#2. Plan, Plan, and Plan Some More:

Save yourself the time, stress and panic of leaving everything to the last minute and set aside time to really nail down your holiday season plan. If you’re an ecommerce business, determine when your last shipping days will be, and whether you’re offering any Black Friday, Cyber Monday or holiday season deals. If you’re a service-provider, check, decide whether you’re taking any time out over the holidays and whether or not you’ll be taking on any new work. If you’re a working parent, factor in the school holidays and how that may impact your time.

Use these dates and plans to create a comprehensive marketing strategy, including your holiday campaign messaging. Then, help out future-you by pre-writing your email and social media content. You can edit and schedule them later when you have more detail to include, but creating those templates now to use later will save you so many last-minute headaches, or worse, missed opportunities.

#3. Get In the Inbox:

If you have an existing subscriber base, increasing your email frequency in the lead-up to sales can be highly beneficial. Your competitors will be flooding your customers' inboxes, and if you aren't in there too, you're missing out on a valuable opportunity. Make sure to segment your email list properly to ensure relevance and maximise your conversion rates. Just remember - there’s a fine line between “increasing your send frequency” and spamming your audience, so keep an eye on your stats, especially your unsubscribe rate. If that starts to jump, you may need to scale back.

#4. Advertise Yo’self:

With the majority of shoppers spending their time on social media, utilising online ads is an effective strategy to reach your target audience. Even if you don't typically advertise throughout the year, this holiday busy season is a good time of the year to set aside a little extra budget to run either search or social ads. Get your brand infront of your audience in places where they already are! Retargeting campaigns are also especially effective in converting potential customers who have already shown interest in your products.

#5. Customer Experience is Key:

The last thing you want to do is spend all this time and extra money to take advantage of the holiday boom, only to drop the ball when it comes to your customer experience. You want your new customers to come back to you time and time again, leave you good reviews, and refer you to their friends and family. And your customer experience is what will help you achieve this.

So - you need to make sure your business is prepared to handle and influx of orders or new business. Ensure you have the bandwidth and resources to handle a spoke in orders or customer enquiries. Double-check your inventory levels to prevent any shortages or delays. And consider whether you’ll need an extra set of hands to help you fulfil orders, outsource work to, or manage customer service.

The holiday season is a critical time for many businesses - ecommerce and service-based alike. By planning ahead and being smart with your marketing, your messaging, and your resources, you can maximise the opportunity that it presents for your business.

If you need further assistance in strategising for the holiday season, consider my 1-hour Digital Strategy Session, where I can help you tailor your online strategy and create your step-by-step holiday marketing action plan. You can book your session directly on through my website, at a time that works for you.

BOOK ME IN!