With Christmas a few short weeks away, you want to ensure that you get your sales in front of as many potential customers as possible. Many brands rely on email and social media for this, only to be lost in the sea of emails and competition from other brands vying for attention.
It’s quite the challenge to stand out if you’re solely relying on email..
Don’t let your brand get drowned out in today’s overstuffed email inboxes or infinite mindless scrolling through social media. While we think these are great tools and can be used effectively in the right situation, with increasing competition during the holiday season, we recommend trying something a little different.
It can be quite the challenge to launch a truly original holiday marketing campaign without a massive marketing budget to back you up. We recognize that (although it is fun to see what Coca Cola gets up to each year).
So here we have compiled a few unusual but actionable ways to get your message to your customers. We hope the following ideas get your holiday promotions the customer attention (and sales!) they deserve 👍
7 Unusual Ways to Let Your Customers Know About Your Holiday Deals
Send SMS Sale Alerts
This year we have noticed more brands advertising on social media and with greater frequency, as many marketing budgets are shifted from above-the-line advertising to digital.
Often the call to action in these social media ads are to sign up for sale alerts by dropping an email address. But on Boxing Day, who’s going to be searching for your promotional email? Probably the people who were going to do so anyway.
They say a good open rate for promotional email is 20%. What if we told you you could achieve almost 400% improvement on that open rate?
SMS are opened 98% of the time, with 90% opened within minutes of receipt.
Imagine that. If you have 500 people in your database, with email you’d be lucky to be seen by 100 of them. That means you’re missing out on 400 people seeing your message. With SMS, that number is reduced to 10.
So once you’ve collected your customer details through your database-building social media campaigns, try using a SMS blast to send your promotional campaign.
Bonus – you can create an SMS campaign in minutes:
- No need to engage a designer for a header image with all the right dimensions
- No agonising over which subject lines will give the best open rate
- No wasting your day trying to get email formatting to behave correctly on different devices
It’s really so simple!
Google Ads
Stay with us here – you might have Google Ads running all year round, or even be setting up search ads with holiday-themed copy.
No we’re talking about some of the other features that will really help with getting your holiday promotions noticed.
Google Ads have become so much more than just simply the text ads that appear before the organic search results. Search ads have become richer, with images and links in Shopping Ads, search promotion extensions and the introduction of the Discovery Campaign format. Depending on your business, you can really use these to drive more eyeballs, clicks and conversions to your holiday deals.
Google Shopping Ads
So imagine yourself as a customer – perhaps you know exactly the item you’re looking for and enter it into a Google search, and these are the results that return.
Are you looking at the text ads on the left or the rich, image-based ads on the right?
Or maybe you have a broad idea of the need you’re trying to fill, for example, find a Christmas gift for mum.
Often Google will serve the shopping ads above the text-based ads, making the shopping ads unmissable and overshadowing the text ads below.
Promotion Extensions
Boost your current search ads and promote your holiday deals right from your existing ad space with promotion extensions. For example Nuraphone above have enabled Black Friday promotion extensions to show their deal and how long it’s valid for.
Extensions are easy to set up in your Google Ads account, through the Ads and Extensions section. Promotion extensions give you additional real estate to ensure your ad gets noticed and also allow you to entice customers to click with your awesome holiday deal. Or you can even add them to your shopping ad for massive impact!
Discovery Campaigns
All well and good if you sell products with search demand right? If your product is new/disruptive to the industry, relatively unknown or there simply is very low search volume for it, there’s only so many Google search or shopping ads you can set up. If you rely on educating your customers about the existence of your product and/or why they need it, then look into Discovery campaigns to share your holiday deals.
Discovery ads are a new form of display advertising where your ads appear in Gmail, Youtube and Google Discover (formerly Feed). Google optimises your discovery ads to be shown to those most likely to interact with and buy from your website, so you can reach potential customers without them searching for your brand/product. You can set up your discovery campaign in minutes and have them running that day.
Old-School PR Outreach
Get back to basics and do some old-school PR outreach. With many publications (online and offline) compiling gift guides you can expand your brand awareness through placement in these guides.
Write a basic press release and send it to as many relevant publications as possible. Just ensure it’s relevant to your business – for example, there’s no point wasting time sending pressers about your awesome beauty products to TechRepublic. However, if you’re in the tech industry, getting onto their gift guide would be a massive boost to your brand visibility.
Create Your Own Gift Guide
Or if you sell many products, why not consider compiling your own gift guide? Identify your target audience, what they’re interested in and what an appropriate persona for that person may be. This is where you can get very specific.
For example, if you sell artisan cheeses, cured meats or other types of gourmet produce, you may identify your target persona as a ‘foodie’ and curate a gift guide for foodies.
There are a few different ways to present your gift guide. You might choose to create a landing page and list products with pictures and drive traffic to this page through search ads or social media. Or create an image with all the products on it, so people are spoon-fed exactly what to buy and in a format that’s highly shareable.
Above is a great example of a highly specific segment – toys for a 9 year old child. It also works well showing a spectrum of price points, depending on your budget.
User Generated Content
If you sell photogenic products, let your customers help spread the word for you. Incentivise sharing their pictures of your product – whether you create a competition or offer a discount for those who share their pics. User generated content or UGC is great for creating authenticity around your product.
For example, you may have perfectly shot images with great lighting and models. Using UGC that isn’t so perfect gives people a sense of the quality or performance of your product in everyday settings. It’s also great for mixing up your social media posts – some perfect shots, some user generated content, branding/promotional type posts and perhaps a meme or two.
Glossier does this well:
Depending on how engaged your customers are with your brand, simply asking for them to share their pics with you may even result in some great content for you. As they say, if you don’t ask, you don’t get.
Co-marketing
Team up with a complementary small business – comarketing is a great opportunity to reach a new customer base and solve similar problems for your existing customers.
For example, if you sell home gym equipment, a great co-marketing fit might be an activewear company. Your customers are likely to need gear to wear while exercising at home with your equipment, while clients of your partner company may be thinking about shifting from traditional gyms to a home-gym regime (especially in times where people may be more home-bound).
There are many great examples of brands finding an amazing partnership fit:
- Hershey’s and Betty Crocker (yum!)
- H&M’s collaborations with luxury brands, including Balmain, Kenzo, Jimmy Choo and Versace. These collaborations allow H&M customers to access luxury labels at affordable prices, while these brands can gain exposure without sacrificing their status.
- Hubspot and Chatfuel – there are so many great opportunities for collaboration for those in the software as a service industry through software integrations👌
Send a Postcard Campaign
Can’t remember the last time you received something other than bills or store catalogues in the mail? Neither can we.
Furthermore, when you receive a postcard in the mail, you can’t help but read it.
Send a beautifully printed postcard to your customers to let them know about your upcoming holiday deals and be unmissable. Furthermore, you can send postcards in bulk in just a few clicks!
The holiday season is a time of massive opportunity for business owners. This year is already gearing up to be a record breaking year for online sales. This brings with it more competition and challenges being heard. So try something different to get ahead of your competitors and in front of more eyeballs. Happy marketing!
holiday marketing
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