According to one well-known carol, the holiday season is “the most wonderful time of the year”—but it can also be the busiest and most stressful. So far, 2020 has been of the roughest years in recent memory, so this holiday season, clients and customers are likely to choose the brands and businesses that make them feel good about themselves and better about the world at large. Creating a high-quality experience for customers both before and after checkout is likely to be the biggest holiday marketing trend we’ll see this year.
Here are some ways you can make your customers feel warm and fuzzy this year.
1. Provide helpful content. Provide content that helps your customers navigate the stressful parts of the holidays, but make sure the content is also relevant to the products and/or services your business provides.
2. Show your gratitude. Be sure to thank your customers in some way for their loyalty and patronage during the holidays. See our earlier post on thanking your customers for more ideas.
3. Offer a discount or a free reward with each purchase over $25 (or $50, or $100). Christmas shopping isn’t entirely selfless; consumers often take advantage of sales to buy things for themselves as well. Find ways to incentivize them to spend a certain amount of money.
4. Engage your customers on social media. Don’t just tweet at them; ask them questions, provide personalized responses to comments, and post things that make them feel happy and excited about the holidays. Just being a positive presence online will win you customer loyalty (and help make the world a better place).
5. Make your customers feel safe and welcome in your office or store. With the pandemic expected to continue through the winter and into the spring, people who visit you in person this holiday season are literally risking their lives to do business with you. Require your employees to wear masks, and provide masks at the door for customers who didn’t bring one.
6. Get started early. The time to begin planning your holiday marketing strategy is now, in late August/early September. Starting early lets you brainstorm the best ideas and execute them excellently in time for the holiday shopping season.
7. Utilize social media (correctly). Different kinds of posts work better on different platforms, and different demographics use different platforms as well. Know who uses which platform and what to post where so that your social media marketing reaches the right audience in the right way.
8. Make your marketing festive and holiday-appropriate. Appeal to your customers’ positive holiday emotions, and think of ways to relate your brand’s specific values and attributes to the holidays.
9. Get ready for e-commerce. More and more people are choosing to do their holiday shopping entirely online each year. If you’re not already set up for online transactions, your business is at a disadvantage.
10. Take advantage of sales apps. If you’re a small restaurant or clothing brand, you don’t need to have your own app the way most big-name businesses do, but you should definitely be connected to one of the many existing e-commerce apps like DoorDash and Shopbop.
Let Absolute Holdings Group help you get ready for this year’s holiday season in style. Give us a call or reach out to us on social media to find out what we can do for your business!