What Is Holiday Marketing and How to Make the Most of it?

Holiday marketing might be a traditional marketing model, but it has certainly evolved a lot in the last few years. For instance, with the rise in digital marketing, it has become easier than ever to reach out to a wider audience and get more leads during holidays.

Therefore, to help you generate more sales in the coming festive season, I have come up with this detailed guide on holiday marketing with some smart tips that you must implement.

Holiday Marketing: Things to Know

In a nutshell, holiday marketing is the process of taking intensive marketing measures during the holiday season via different channels. These days, digital platforms are mostly considered to promote a product or an upcoming sale during the holiday season. The marketing tactics are designed specifically around the relevant holiday that not only promotes a brand but can also drastically increase its revenue.

Do you know that in 2020, sales of more than $10.8 billion were made on Cyber Monday alone? This is one of the many examples of how big holiday shopping has become and you should certainly not hesitate to take a slice of it.

5-Step Program for Any Holiday Marketing Strategy

It doesn’t matter if you are selling electronics or apparel, you can come up with a dedicated holiday marketing strategy for your online store. To do that, you need to closely follow these 5 steps:

1. Have an Overall Plan

Firstly, you need to come up with an overall plan regarding your marketing campaign in advance. Most of the experts recommend coming up with a strategy a month or two before the event. From the major marketing platforms to be covered to how you will execute the plan, you need to think of everything in advance.

2. Focus on Marketing Channels

Now, you need to identify and focus on specific platforms where you want to promote the holiday marketing strategy. For instance, you might want to push email marketing or promote some posts on Instagram. This would mostly depend on your brand’s identity and the platform where your target audience is active the most.

3. Collect User Data

This is one of the most vital steps that a lot of marketers tend to skip. Before you launch your campaign, do some research to study user trends and data. You should have all the vital pieces of information before you roll the campaign so that you can make data-driven decisions.

4. Roll Out!

Finally, you should roll out your holiday marketing campaign at least a couple of weeks before the big day. In this way, you would have enough time to prepare for the holiday sales and can create a buzz around the upcoming events.

5. Follow up

Most importantly, consider posting more than usual during the holiday season on your social channels. You can also host giveaways, contests, and other kinds of events that would get more engagement and push your marketing content. You can even drop a post or two after the holiday season to conclude the campaign and give it a final push.

7 Smart Tips to Make the Most of Holiday Marketing

If you want to get effective results with your holiday marketing strategy this season, then I would recommend following these smart tips and tricks.

Tip 1: Try to Include Emotional Elements in Your Marketing Campaign

You might have already seen how sentimental shoppers can get during the festive season. Therefore, if you want to create brand awareness regarding holidays, then try to come up with some emotional content.

You don’t have to push your brand’s value in the face and can focus more on the sentimental appeal behind the holiday instead.

Tip 2: Make Your Marketing Campaign around the Spirit of the Festival

From Christmas to Halloween and Thanksgiving to New Year’s Eve, there could be all kinds of holidays and special occasions to run your marketing campaign. Try not to come up with a generic campaign that you can run during any other time of the year as well.

Instead, you should focus on having special graphics, copies, promo codes, and all kinds of content that would be specific to the upcoming holiday.

Tip 3: Choose Your Marketing Medium Wisely

You might already know that there can be tons of social and digital marketing channels out there like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and so much more. Ideally, you should go to the insights or the analytics page of the social media platform to know more about your audience.

In this way, you can know about their buying preferences and can easily pick a preferred medium where your audience already exists.

For instance, if you sell jewelry or makeup online, then running ads on Instagram would be a better idea. Similarly, if you are selling online books, then you can consider running ads on Reddit or Goodreads instead.

Tip 4: Connect Your Efforts to a Social Cause

While shopping is a vital part of the holiday season, people also like to give back to the world during these festive occasions. Therefore, you can also consider combining both these things to make an impact during the festive season.

Apart from running time-limited offers and sales, you can also be associated with a cause. You can tell your customers that a part of their purchase would go to the selected cause in advance. In this way, your customers can have a thoughtful holiday shopping experience and you can also help others at the same time.

Tip 5: Create Personalized Alerts and Offers

If you want to get fast results with your holiday marketing plans, then you should focus on running customized ads or promotional activities. One of the best ways to do that is by pushing email or SMS alerts that you can easily customize.

A personalized email would not only convey specific holiday greetings to your customers, but you can also make them familiar with some unique offers that are being hosted just for them. This would make your audience feel valued and it can also improve the overall ROI of your campaign.

Tip 6: Don’t Overdo it!

Most importantly, avoid making the rookie mistake of posting a lot of content during the festive season. As suggested above, your holiday marketing strategy should start weeks before and must be evenly spread.

While it is okay to post more on specific days, you should not spam your audience with too much similar content. Also, try to come up with a diverse content plan so that you can post about your products, ongoing offers, giveaways, and more without being redundant.

Tip 7: Create an Annual Calendar in Advance

A lot of marketers think that holiday discounts and offers are only for a handful of occasions. We know holiday shopping is at its peak during occasions like Black Friday or Christmas, but you should not avoid other important dates as well.

You should do some research to come up with an annual holiday marketing strategy that should include events like Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Eid, Diwali, and other important occasions that are spread all year long.

DSers: Find Perfect Holiday Products for your Dropshipping Store

Having an effective holiday marketing campaign is not enough as you need to have the right products to sell as well. Therefore, if you own a dropshipping store, then you can simply take the assistance of DSers.

It is the official AliExpress dropshipping tool that features millions of products from all kinds of categories in one place.

Bulk Purchasing

You can explore one of the most extensive ranges of products from thousands of sellers on DSers. If you want, you can make bulk purchasing of products on DSers that can drastically save your time.

Supplier Optimizer

DSers has also come up with a unique supplier optimizer feature that would let you select some of the most reputed and profitable suppliers for your preferred products.

Automatic Features

If you want, you can enable mark-up rules to automatically set up the pricing of your products based on a dynamic range. DSers also offered dedicated options like automatic order status updates and syncing of tracking numbers.

Other Options

Apart from that, DSers offers a wide range of features to help you manage your dropshipping store smoothly like bundle products, variant mapping, stock management, product division, and so much more.

Conclusion

As you can see, holidays can be one of the best times to promote your products or store across various marketing platforms.

If you want to make the most of the holiday shopping spirit, then make sure you run tempting ads or host all kinds of events on social media channels. Besides that, you can also follow the above-listed tips to get better results with your holiday marketing tactics.

Also, if you want to host some of the best products in your store this season, then simply take the assistance of DSers and meet all your dropshipping needs in one place.