With the holiday season first approaching, businesses are also preparing for a surge in purchases from consumers. For big and small businesses alike, digital marketing will play a big role in attracting those purchases. Wikipedia describes digital marketing as an umbrella term for all marketing efforts using digital technology. These include mobile, Google search, social media, email and website. So basically any form of marketing that exists online.
When you dig deep and look at the actual specifics of the said channels, there are tactics and assets to the term digital marketing that are not universally agreed on. To bridge that, this post will focus on the most common types and why they will be important for any brand’s success in the digital space through the holiday season.
1 Website
Do all businesses need a website? Yes. Social media has been revolutionary and its capabilities have been very convenient for marketing efforts for businesses. However social media alone cannot be used to communicate the full value of your brand’s value proposition. A standard rule for a basic social media post includes three major things, the copy(words on the post) an image and a call to action, which in most cases urges people to click on a link to a certain site. With a lot of growing scepticism about which brands users interact with online, a website is a great vehicle to allow people to learn more about your brand, provide more information that could not fit into one social media post and give people the comfort level they seek to aid in making their purchasing decisions.
A common feature among small businesses is that they have concerns about their business not being web-oriented and hence don’t see the need for having a website. A simple fix for this is provided by WordPress where you can create and set up your own website and domain with a budget of less than $100. Any web presence at this time of the season is better than none. Your potential customers expect it and your competitors probably already have theirs. So don’t rob your business of an asset that is as important to your business as mobile phones have become to facilitating communication.
- Content Marketing
Content is the fuel that drives most marketing efforts. It has many layers to it, it can be promotional in nature, or a mix of other titles such as informational, educative or even inspirational. When you become a valuable source of information online, you can be sure people will keep coming back and more importantly, they will never tune your brand out. A common content marketing strategy used during the holiday season is creating and sharing material that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in spending on particular things because of the season. This content will also support the common digital marketing assets with social media playing an integral part in promoting your brand. Other tactics include creating themed landing pages on your website with colours and information about the holidays, blogs on products and services (related to your brand and the season), and improving your site’s search engine optimization by placing content with keywords associated with the holiday season.
Without good content, it is almost impossible to attract and retain a clearly defined audience with the objective of driving profitable customer action. The most important thing to remember is that with content marketing, the timing has to be correct, meaning that you start early and prepare people for what to expect in the holiday season. So you might want to start tweaking and planning and executing a few weeks before the holidays set in to make sure you reach a wider audience.
- Media Buying
If you make content to promote your brand, you will need to monetize it and get it in front of people, it’s where you want to be. Media buying is simply the use of ads to make sure your content is visible to audiences at all costs. From your website to all your assets being driven and supported by content marketing, media buying brings a huge spectrum of options that amplify the goal of reaching your objectives using digital marketing.
For platforms like Facebook, it is almost impossible to get any meaningful engagement from users on a regular because the platform has an algorithm that limits the organic reach of posts by brands. This has been ongoing over the years and with the increase of pages on the platform, they have been reducing their visibility in people’s feeds. The good news is that with as little as $5 you can reach over 7000 people with a single post. More if you increase spending. This essentially makes Facebook a pay-to-play platform. With great content, you may survive on platforms such as Instagram and Twitter. However, you need to raise the number of engaged users and this is achieved by running ads on Instagram designed to do just that.
Media buying also extends to PPC campaigns (pay per click) which are run exclusively by Google and Display ads which may be run from Google or other platforms i.e. programmatic advertising. These are very useful over the holiday season as they are known to be effective in driving leads (PPC) to your website as they appear after a particular keyword is searched or they (display ads) appear in websites that are relevant to your product making your money well spent and helps build a relevant audience.
The best kind of marketing has always been about connecting with your audiences at the right place, with the right message at the right time. The holiday season is fast approaching and these tips when applied correctly are bound to help your brand achieve holiday success.
