Event-based marketing campaign ideas for your target audience

For many eCommerce businesses, the holiday season can be a hectic time of the year - but for your business, if you are following your marketing plan you are ready for those occasions as an opportunity. With the portfolio of content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing your activities can resonate to reach your target audience. With this reach, a well-designed call to action can then be the trigger for an engaged audience on your site driving sales. The holiday shopping season starts with Black Friday and Cyber Monday past New Year's. Therefore pre-announce your exciting deals with blog posts and via your Email list to get them excited about what will be featured and offered.

A great holiday marketing strategy

If you have a marketing plan, revisit the plan to check for today's market dynamics and make sure you are still on track. Additionally, if you have been engaged in content marketing strategies, make sure your current content marketing campaigns will engage like you have been planning. Confirmation of this involves checking how your keyword trends are going, your Google Analytics trends and profiling, and lastly how your current conversions are in relation to your current marketing. Putting an effort into marketing for an event can be easily defeated if you haven't reviewed your current marketing trends and performance.

Auditing previous marketing campaigns

Looking back to previous years of your marketing campaigns to see what worked and what didn't is also a good place to learn and apply your knowledge and wisdom towards better targeting your audience and if you have a new group of people you would like to expand your marketing to. To ensure you have a good target audience to start with, growing your email list is a good place to start from. Email addresses can be used in social media marketing as well. Your social media marketing strategy has to encompass both your content marketing and advertising. Looking back at your process and methods of customer engagement, your strategy has to preserve the best practices and revisit the areas of weak performance.

Customer data and demographics are key to study over the past years and identify if there are any shifts to take into consideration. Marketing automation often overlooks this, and it requires a dedicated review to ensure you find your target audience with precision when it comes to holiday marketing due to the higher competitive nature that these events have. The desired action here is to look at your social media target pools, your Email lists, your SEO Keywords and visitors, and which content is pulling the highest interest.

Adapting your holiday marketing strategy to your audience

At times, learning from the competition on how they do their holiday marketing and following their lead may result in poor performance since you are relying on their analytical skills and execution. It is always best to see what may be working well for the competition but come up with a stronger plan yourself. Competitive learning can take place by doing a SWOT of the competition by mapping their Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. With this in hand, you get a better objective you on what is to be learned, and what you might pilot or apply to your strategy for the holidays.

You can't just profile your target audience by age, earnings, and where they spend their time. Using focus groups to understand the user engagement on certain products validates the demographic you are going for on key products. If you cannot conduct your own marketing research, then have friends and family around a table, and have a fun session capturing their input. The intrinsic knowledge and perspective can be a great enhancer of your approach to marketing the products you are looking to promote for the holiday event.

Look for adding flexible ways of doing business with fresh gift ideas combined with additional payment methods, logistics such as curbside pickup, and deliveries with gift wrapping options.

Holiday marketing strategies worth considering

Here are some tips that might help to ensure you have a solid footing and plan for your holiday marketing plans - especially for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

• Have meetings set up with your team and extended team to collect market information in the from of Competition, Supply Chain, Product trends, Economic Environment, Current marketing performance, and budgets for your marketing activities.
• Have your team comment and the current marketing plan, see if your strategy is shifting away from the market, and in what way, and look to adjusting.
• With gaps, opportunities, and profit pools identified, planning your approach to holiday marketing activities can be set. Knowing the 4 Ps clearly, especially in the Product and Promotion for the holiday season is crucial. Given that Place and Price are easily set and understood.
• Ensure you have a "Loyalty Program" in place to capture the surge of users and entice them to be returning customers. Take the opportunity to have marketing residual to leverage between Black Friday, and Cyber Monday all the way to Christmas.
• Have small interim events over the holiday period to maintain engagement. Plan a slow week on how customers can engage in activity - raffles, donations, and social-based events can be a great way to keep the engagement going.
• Coordinate your marketing between campaigns to have keywords reinforced between social media, content marketing, and advertising. This is very important for search, referral, and ranking.
• If you can, do SWOTs for your main competition yearly to keep track of their progression, changes made, and if they are gaining strength. If they are faltering, see if you can pick up that audience for yourself if deemed profitable.
• If you are able, perform some A/B Testing on your value propositions, landing pages, and any other area of your website that has call-to-actions to ensure you optimized your conversions. Conversion Rate Optimization is a crucial aspect of good marketing execution.

Conclusion

Holiday marketing can be much like any event marketing, as it requires careful thought and research for strong execution and result. While it may not be easy for any business to take the time to reflect on the past, look at the competition, or drive continuous improvement - it is a must-have to succeed. Success builds on previous success and it doesn't take much to miss the mark. Due diligence ensures that you can build upon your success and that your digital marketing plan delivers for your business, employees, and customers. If you would need assistance in the marketing space, give us a shout at wish@thegenielab.com