While overall retail spending is predicted to reach $1.328 trillion for the 2023 holiday season, consumers are still largely prioritizing saving over spending as financial uncertainty hangs in the air.
Brands should begin strategically promoting themselves and their products well before the holiday season to ensure they’re firmly ingrained in customers’ minds when the shopping frenzy commences. It’s up to us as marketers to build strong connections with these buyers and provide them with value that’s worth their hard-earned dollars. Here are some ways to set up your brand for success this holiday season.
Give Existing Customers the Scoop
If there’s one thing consumers love, it’s exclusivity. Framing limited access to new product assortments and holiday discounts is an effective way to encourage conversions. You can attract your audience by promoting upcoming deals, or providing “early access” or a “sneak peek,” to entice engagement. Offering special promotions by signing up for SMS notifications or downloading an app enables brands to expand their ways of connecting with their customers.
Create Holiday Landing Pages
Launching a holiday-specific landing page provides your audience with a consistent experience throughout your holiday campaign. With designated landing pages, you can align your messaging and offers to what your customers already see in social ads or promotional emails — eliminating confusion and reducing friction before a purchase. Publishing the landing page as early as possible is essential to provide as much time as possible to analyze performance and optimize the content.
Activate Retargeting Campaigns
Retargeting campaigns enable brands to re-engage users who’ve previously interacted with their website or content to increase their likelihood of conversion. For example, retargeting display ads can capture the attention of past visitors as they browse social media or other websites. You can also use retargeting campaigns to try to convert customers who’ve left items in carts or failed to complete your desired action.
Most retargeting campaigns use cookie tracking or pixel tags to target users who’ve been to your website or engaged with your content. You can then use this data to serve customized ads relevant to individual users and their browsing history.
Optimize Your Content for Search
As holiday shoppers search for the perfect gifts, you’ll want your brand and products to appear at the top of their search engine results. It’s never too early to start creating holiday content, as it usually takes several months before you’ll see any meaningful page rankings.
Start by reviewing relevant search keywords from last year’s holiday season, then narrow down your target keywords and content. After you’ve nailed your target keyword list, optimize your website content for those keywords so you can rank as a top result in related search queries. Don’t forget to analyze your site’s performance regularly, both for your desktop and mobile experiences. If you’re running low on time or budget, you can update and optimize last year’s holiday content to benefit from existing SEO value, which generates quicker results than creating net new content.
Effective holiday marketing can be costly and challenging, especially as the season draws on. By putting your brand in front of customers now, you can offset the eventual rise to cost per mille (CPM) that occurs in November and December. It is wise to get a head start on your holiday campaigns to save resources and effectively generate anticipation and excitement ahead of the holiday season.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vibhor Kapoor
President of AdRoll
As President of AdRoll, Vibhor Kapoor is responsible for driving AdRoll’s revenue growth, overseeing product, strategy, sales, operations, and marketing. He brings to this role almost three decades of industry experience and business leadership expertise in SaaS and cloud platforms. Before joining AdRoll, Kapoor was a Senior Director in Adobe’s Digital Media Business and a Vice President of Marketing at Box. With prior roles at Microsoft and General Electric, Kapoor has led businesses and teams through cycles of industry transformations spanning cloud, API platforms, e-commerce and digital design..