The beginning of the holiday season brings about a happy time for both customers and businesses. While the former gets the exclusive opportunity to purchase goods and services at heavily discounted prices, the latter acquires a dynamic seasonal window within which they can generate leads, drive traffic, trigger conversions and enhance revenues.
So much so, that according to a leading market research company E-Marketer, the power-packed shopping weekends of Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas are going to push up the total retail sales in the United States by 3.8% or $1.008 trillion! As a result, the holiday season of 2019 is expected to become the first-ever trillion-dollar holiday season in US history.
In such a situation, the only way to gain a decisive edge over all your competitors is by drafting a comprehensive, competent and innovative social media marketing strategy. However, for your social media strategy to be truly effective and engaging, it will have to be transformed into a targeted holiday marketing campaign.
Here are a few ways by which you can optimize your social media strategy to suit the pressing requirements of a demanding holiday season –
Plan Ahead
The holiday season will most likely keep you occupied. You will be required to take orders, pack products, ship goods and deal with the entire logistics funnel, on your own. This means that if you intend to devise a proper social media holiday campaign, you will have to plan well in advance!
So, begin your optimization journey while you still have the time by answering some basic questions about your prospective social media marketing strategy. These include:
- What is the overall objective of your holiday marketing campaign?
- Which social media platforms do you plan to target?
- What will be the total duration for which your campaign will run?
- Who will be your target audience, and how will you identify them?
- What resources would you require to meet the needs of your campaign?
Based on your answers, develop a daily schedule which you will follow during the implementation of your social media strategy. Most social media outlets will allow you to curate these posts and schedule them for publishing, as and when you deem fit.
Learn Lessons
Before you start preparing a brand new social media marketing plan, go through your strategies of the previous few years. Find out why they succeeded or failed. Rather, use them as an opportunity to learn lasting lessons.
For doing this, evaluate your older holiday marketing campaigns by:
- Seeking detailed analytics reports from platforms like Facebook & Twitter
- Reviewing how each post performed in terms of viewer engagement
- Narrowing down on the exact time when customer interaction was highest
- Finding out whether text/image-based content worked better than videos
- Examining the posts put out in the same period by your competitors
Knowing such details from the years gone by will enable you to design a social media holiday campaign that is data-driven, future-oriented and efficient.
Audit
As a major part of overhauling your holiday marketing campaign, start auditing your social media accounts as soon as you can. The basic aim of this auditing process must be to establish your own brand, send out consistent messages and align your business account with the personality of the social media platform.
Begin this audit operation by:
- Checking for outdated information or broken links, if any
- Removing irrelevant content including images, blogs, videos or posts
- Updating logos, taglines, and business profiles
- Using the same fonts and hashtags across different textual domains
- Providing similar content format on various social media platforms
Once the auditing process is complete, make sure that you re-brand your social media marketing strategy in accordance with the latest holiday season trends and patterns.
Create Engaging Content
Good content is the lifeline of any social media marketing strategy. Not only does it help your target audience via valuable and personalized messages, but it also equips you to promote your brand by inspiring and educating customers. In fact, 72% of marketers believe that content has the power to increase user engagement by leaps and bounds!
Therefore, for optimizing your social media marketing content to suit the needs of the holiday season, you will have to:
- Use promotional videos – Video users experience 49% revenue growth as compared to non-video users
- Use pictures and images – 51% of B2B and B2C marketers already employ a variety of visual assets on social media
- Post Instagram stories, go live with sales and provide discounts for a limited time span
- Develop a hashtag that you can employ to make your content go viral. This can also be used to track your campaign
- Choose a logo which will become the identity of your brand throughout the holiday marketing campaign
- Design sponsored posts through Facebook Ad manager to generate content for specific demographics
- Use an Excel sheet to see what has been planned for every social channel
Such customized and delightful content will work wonders to build long-term customer trust and loyalty for your social media holiday campaign.
Communicate
Last but not least, communicate! Talk to your customers, listen to their feedback, address their grievances and interact with them on a regular basis. Doing so will maximize their experience on your social media platform, thereby turning you into their most preferred destination. So, start responding to comments and replying to messages as early as possible. Show your customers that you aren’t just an unemotional and impassive chatbot. Instead, you are an expressive voice that is both friendly and approachable.
Final Words
In the modern-day, social media is an omnipresent and omnipotent tool. As a business, you just can’t ignore its significance or flounder on your social media marketing strategy. This becomes all the more important when it comes to creating a competent holiday marketing campaign. You need to optimize your tactics, streamline your methods and improve your engagements in order to keep up with the challenges of the holiday season. Especially so because during this time, the social media presence of prospective customers increases by over 2 hours and 22 minutes!
For more knowledge about how you can optimize your social media strategy for the holidays, click here.