The winter holidays are just around the corner, which means the holiday shopping season is already underway. Online shopping is expected to grow as much as 4 percent this season, according to the National Retail Federation, so it’s crucial for online businesses to ramp up their marketing efforts as soon as possible to attract more holiday shoppers looking for cool gifts and sweet deals. You shouldn’t just promote your items and services exactly the same way you promote them all year long, however. To truly capture your audience’s attention, here are a few festive, holiday-themed ways to stand out this winter:
Create Holiday-Themed Banners and Profile Pictures
Even if it’s as simple as finding a stock photo of a dog in a sweater or a family sitting by a grand fireplace, transforming your social pages with holiday-themed photos is a great way to let your followers know you’re actively dedicated to making their holidays the most wonderful time of the year. Adorable photos of kids wearing Santa hats or animals sporting ugly holiday sweaters are bound to generate significant attention among the holiday crowd (though make sure you choose photos that are relevant to your brand’s offerings). For the most diverse approach possible, try to incorporate multiple winter symbols beyond just Christmas figures and colors so you can reach audiences that celebrate many different holidays.
Roll Out Winter Holiday Promotions
What’s the point of running winter holiday-themed marketing campaigns if you’re not including a special deal to incentivize winter shoppers to visit your website or e-store? Even if you just offer free shipping or a 10% discount for limited periods of time, customers are ultimately bargain-hunters who want to stretch their budgets to find the best items for friends and family members. Your holiday promotion might include a discount code for your Instagram followers, Facebook giveaways exclusively for followers, website-wide discounts for anyone who visits your site, and so much more. The more creative you are, the more your audiences will appreciate your brand and likely spend more time browsing your website when searching for holiday gifts.
Accumulate User-Generated Content with Festive Contests
Your marketing efforts might also include contests designed to build your treasure trove of user-generated content. This is an ideal strategy for brands with considerable presence on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, and you can create contests by crafting a unique hashtag for users to include in their posts as part of their contest entries. User-generated content is highly effective because it relies on word-of-mouth marketing (which is oftentimes more trustworthy to consumers compared to other forms of marketing) and you can later re-use that content as part of your own social channels’ marketing strategy to attract as many winter holiday shoppers as you possibly can.
Write Creative Copy Based on Holiday Jingles
Want to wow your followers with your creativity and generate more interest in what your brand has to offer? Consider incorporating Christmas carols and other winter jingles into your copy for social posts by rewriting the lyrics with words and phrases more relevant to your brand. For instance, if you sell pet products, you could write something like, “Fetch the balls with your border collie” (play on “Deck the Halls”). To successfully imitate winter holiday songs, it’s important to use words that sound relatively similar to the original song and have the same number of syllables in the copy.