The festive season is here! Did you make changes to your social media holiday schedule for this significant time of year? Although it’s best to plan for the holidays in advance, you can still join in on the celebrations and modify your strategy. Here are eight social media tips for the holidays that you can implement immediately. Keep on reading!
8 Holiday Social Media Tips
1. Emphasize Family, Friendship, and Community
Present your team members and conduct interviews with your staff about their holiday plans and traditions. Are any of your team members dressing up or wearing festive sweaters for the holidays? Share these updates on your channels to liven them up.
It’s not necessary to maintain a serious business persona at all times and focus solely on promoting products and increasing profits. Taking advantage of the holiday season to give customers a glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes can be beneficial in terms of generating more sales.
2. Don’t Forget About the New Year
We often give excessive attention to the year-end festivities to the extent that we react with a mere acknowledgement when the ball drops at midnight. It is crucial to remember that the transition from December 31 to January 1 signifies the commencement of a fresh year.
As a new year begins, it presents an opportunity for fresh beginnings and setting new objectives for both you and your followers. Take the initiative to disclose your intentions to your audience and motivate them to do likewise.
Regardless of the path you choose, the aim is to view the end of 2019 as a stepping stone to new and improved opportunities in 2020 – and to involve your online followers in the journey and growth. Effective social media tips for the holidays aren’t limited to Christmas alone.
3. Consider 12 Days of Giveaways or Sales
Many brands have found inspiration in the widely known holiday tune, The Twelve Days of Christmas, and implemented their own 12 days of promotions or giveaways.
Borrowing money for your campaign is simple and provides a defined timeline of 12 days. This format encourages followers to return each day for fresh and thrilling content. The limited duration of the sale also instills a sense of urgency as it will conclude by the end of each day.
4. Recap Some of the Year’s Highlights
During the holiday season, it’s a great chance to reflect on the past year and commemorate your achievements with the people around you. Have you contributed to a good cause through your brand? Perhaps you introduced a successful product line. Have you engaged in community events, received noteworthy recognition, or had a team member celebrate a new addition to their family? Take a look at your highlights reel and see what stands out.
5. Keep Up Your Posting Frequency
Q4 is an overly busy time for everyone, and for certain brands, it is the most significant period of the year, upon which the entirety of the year depends. Consequently, some brands forego their social media, which should not be the case. In fact, they should prioritize it.
Ensure that the daily hustle and bustle of your business operations does not impede the momentum of your holiday campaigns. Instead, pause your current tasks and plan ahead by scheduling a week’s worth of social media posts. This can be accomplished in a matter of minutes with the aid of a social media management tool such as eClincher.
6. Update Your Pages With Seasonal Photos
One of the easiest social media tips for the holidays is what we’re about to suggest!
To maintain the novelty and allure, incorporate a seasonal touch by refreshing the profile and banner visuals on your social media accounts. Avoid completely revamping them; instead, you should aim to maintain your brand’s identity and familiarity.
7. Watch for Spiked Costs and Increased Competition on Your Paid Campaigns
During the holiday season, numerous brands increase their expenditure to attract social media users. Therefore, it is advisable to closely monitor your paid campaigns since expenses for clicks, engagement, and traffic might escalate. Brands with substantial budgets will strive to grab a more significant share of the market while modestly-funded enterprises have to adjust or struggle amidst the sea of sponsored ads.
What actions can you take regarding this?
It is not possible to have a universal solution as it largely depends on the nature of your brand, offerings, and numerous other variables. However, it is crucial to meticulously track all these indicators and your expenses for bidding, and modify your choice of keywords, audiences, targeting, and expenditure accordingly.
If your Google PPC campaign is running and the bidding cost for a particular keyword is excessively high, it may be worthwhile to search for an alternative keyword that has a similar traffic volume but lower competition, such as long-tail keywords or LSI keywords.
Experiment with your Facebook targeting without hesitation. For instance, let’s assume you’re a clothing brand running an advertisement aimed at mothers with a projected audience size of two million. While this might appear impressive, it becomes meaningless if you do not receive any returns.
Instead, focus on a more specific audience. Although you may not reach a vast number of people, the likelihood of a higher conversion rate is significant.
8. Go Local
Whether you’re a small mom and pop shop or a large brand with numerous locations, it’s important to support local initiatives.
A significant obstacle of social media is that we are essentially anonymous individuals communicating through a screen. A solution to this phenomenon is to step outside of your comfort zone and engage with people directly in person, just like we did before the rise of smartphones and internet connectivity.
Despite being a large brand, Lush Cosmetics humbly announced on Facebook to their one million plus followers that they will be attending Chicago’s BIDE Holiday Market and would love to meet some of their fans there. Lush’s willingness to interact with the public shows their lack of arrogance.
It should be noted that organizing an extravagant spectacle or hosting an event is not mandatory, although it is an option. You can collaborate with another local business that is related to yours or participate in a farmers market. The objective is to promote your brand beyond the online platform and into the real world.
BONUS: How to Choose the Right Digital Marketing Strategy for Your Business
The utilization of online marketing is now an essential approach to establish a thriving and competitive enterprise. Nonetheless, the extensive range of digital marketing opportunities and platforms can seem daunting. Techniques that prove effective for a certain business or sector may not yield the same outcome for your enterprise.
To select the optimal digital marketing approach, it is crucial to comprehend your products and client base, which will assist in creating a tailored plan to attain targeted marketing objectives. Our article will lead you through the process of determining the ideal digital marketing strategy for your business and provide additional online marketing knowledge.
How to choose a digital marketing strategy for your business
A prosperous digital marketing plan doesn’t depend on experimenting with the latest trends or making assumptions about your customers. Rather, it depends on insights that are supported by data.
According to Jess Reilly, the chief marketing officer at Rebel Interactive Group, those who excel at marketing realize that scalable digital marketing has evolved into people-based advertising. This means having the ability to deliver the perfect message on the appropriate platform, to the suitable individual at the ideal time.
To select a digital marketing plan, you must develop buyer personas, establish objectives, pick appropriate digital marketing resources, and evaluate your approach to confirm its effectiveness.
1. Build buyer personas to understand your target audience.
Fictitious individuals embodying the characteristics of potential customers who could be drawn to your brand are known as buyer personas. These personifications aid in targeting your brand’s offerings to this demographic.
Reilly stated that the development of buyer personas can aid in the identification of your marketing approach by highlighting the identity of your buyers, the challenges they encounter, and most importantly, their objectives. Such information can be used to shape your messaging plan.
When constructing customer personas, take into account the subsequent data related to your intended audience.
- Job type
- Interests
- Age
- Gender
- General demographics
- Most-used social platforms
- Beliefs and values
Afterward, tailor your approach according to these particulars.
A helpful suggestion is to gather customer feedback and opinions through surveys conducted online, via email, or text messaging, when seeking to comprehend the pain points and desires of a particular market.
2. Identify your goals, and align them to your strategy.
What specific goals are you aiming to achieve through your marketing strategy? Perhaps you aim to promote brand recognition, raise product sales figures, or grow your social media presence. Having precise objectives will guide your endeavors toward success. Let’s delve into a number of concrete instances.
If your goal is to heighten brand awareness:
Is your brand well-known to your target customers, and do they trust it enough to purchase from you, especially if they typically only purchase from reputable brands?
If your main focus is to raise brand recognition and enhance the reputation of your company.
If your goal is to raise consumer awareness:
Low search volumes for your target keywords may be an indication that consumers are not searching for your company due to a lack of understanding regarding how your product or service can enhance their lives.
If your sales process and website traffic are not the issue, it’s possible that consumer awareness is lacking. In such a scenario, your digital marketing strategy objective should be to enlighten potential customers about a specific issue they may face, and then present them with your solution.
If your goal is to increase traffic:
Most business owners consider traffic as a priority since it is a highly desired key performance indicator (KPI) that results in more sales leads and actual sales with better quality traffic.
To achieve high traffic, concentrate on pay-per-click (PPC) ads, implementing an effective SEO plan, and utilizing email marketing.
If your goal is to increase leads:
It would be impractical to anticipate customers to purchase a costly or intricate product on their maiden online visit. Rather, dedicate your energy to generating potential customers that can be pursued by your sales team.
If your goal is to increase sales:
In order to enhance your sales, it is probable that you must strategically apply email marketing and augment the traffic towards your website’s landing page.
3. Choose digital marketing tools based on your primary goals.
Marketing is equipped with diverse instruments which include content marketing calendar templates, social networks, and email marketing software. Their unique benefits and objectives make each one appropriate for distinct utilization, meaning the most suitable tools for achieving your objectives will depend on your goals.
According to Prentiss, each business requires a unique tool as they all have diverse needs or areas they lack in. Some may lack reviews, rank poorly on Google, or need a website redesign; whatever their needs may be, they would require unique tools.
Give your goals higher priority and carefully examine your budget to identify the most profitable investments. When the sales are distant, utilize affordable tools like social media posts and email as significant amounts of leakage are bound to occur in your sales funnel. You can always revisit and try out different available tools.
4. Audit your current digital marketing strategy.
Assessing your digital marketing approach requires evaluating successes from the past, experimenting with current methods, and identifying necessary adjustments.
- Discover the true ROI of past efforts. You’ll need to measure ROI for digital marketing campaigns you ran in the past. Reilly advised business owners to ask how much “lift” each marketing channel provided in previous seasons. “Using a combination of customer purchase data, digital tracking data and any traditional media buys you have, you can dive into the data to discover what your true ROI was in the past and opportunities to grow in the future,” Reilly said.
- Test new strategies. Before going live with your new strategy, test it to see what might work and what won’t. Spend time figuring out if there are aspects of your strategy that can be fixed or improved.
- Determine what needs tweaking. Prentiss recommended monitoring your progress to determine what might need shifting. “We set daily, weekly and sometimes even monthly reminders to check on the progress we made,” Prentiss said. “The daily and weekly check-ins on what we created are very important in the beginning so we can adjust what we are doing. This truly ensures the success of the campaign.”
In essence, if your ROI is not up to par and you are spending more on obtaining leads than the profit generated after sealing a deal, it is imperative that you make necessary adjustments.
