The holiday season is a very lucrative one for many businesses, and if you want to include your own company in that, it pays to think very seriously about your Christmas marketing strategy.
The sooner you gave a Christmas marketing plan in place, and hew better your holiday marketing strategy is, the more money you are likely to make at what is a busy time for people spending money.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the best Christmas marketing strategies that your business needs to know about right now:
Start at Halloween
When it comes to Christmas marketing if you haven’t started by Halloween, you are putting yourself at a disadvantage. Most on-the-ball businesses will start their marketing around Halloween, if not before, and many customers will start buying Christmas gifts around that time too, so if you haven’t launched your Christmas campaign with lots of great royalty-free Christmas images on your website, special holiday season offers, and some of the other suggestions in this post, you will be lagging behind, and you might find that customers buy their gifts from elsewhere. It’s never too early to make a start.
Gift-giving guides
One of the best marketing tools for the holiday season is undoubtedly the holiday gift-giving guide. Whether you create a glossy brochure showcasing all the gifts you have to offer or you simply make a blog post suggesting the best gifts for every age group, gender, and interest groups within your target audience, providing handy suggestions for people who do not know what to buy is a great way to increase the visibility of your own products, and push customers towards purchasing goods from you in one fell swoop.
Print special holiday packaging
Something that too few businesses do, but which can work really well, is modifying their packaging so that it has a more festive appearance. Yes, it might be a bit more expensive to have all new packaging printed with images of Santa or holly or whatever, when it comes to marketing, you often have to speculate in order to accumulate, and the more attractive your Christmas packaging is, the more appealing it will be to people who are buying gifts around this time of year.
Create “bundles”
Whenever someone clicks to look at an item they might be considering for a Christmas gift, it would be a good idea to ensure there is a pop-up or a sidebar that shows other products that would go well with that product, particularly stocking fillers. This will help to increase the sales by increasing the number of impulse buys. Many people will click only on a specific product they want to buy, so they might not see all of the other great Christmas items you have available, by showcasing them along with the main product, you can convince more of them to buy more things.
Suspend shipping costs
During the holiday season, many of your customers will be spending a lot more money shopping online than they usually do. A lot of customers will also be annoyed at the amount of money they have to spend in shipping just to get their gifts delivered, so it’s an easy win to publicize that you will be offering free shipping over the festive season, so although it might mean slightly less profit on individual sales because you will be encouraging more people to buy, you should be able to make more money overall.
Take advantage of Black Friday and Cyber Monday
These promotions are everywhere, so if your business does not take part, you will end up losing out to competitors who do. It’s always a good idea to have some really good deals on these partial days when lots of people will be shopping, and lots of people will be expecting them.
Offer gift wrapping
Many people shop for convenience around the festive period. Most people don’t relish the thought of having to warp a bunch of gifts, so make it known you offer gift wrapping on every item sold, showcase lots of lovely pictures of perfectly wrapped gifts, and it will be easy to convince people that they should do their Christmas shopping with your business and not anyone else’s.
When it comes to your Christmas marketing strategy, it is a good idea to start planning sooner rather than later, because the more prepared you are, the easier it will be to implement your plans and corner your share of the market.
