The holidays are the special time of the year when family and friends gather around to express their love and spread happiness. For business and marketers, it is a great opportunity to scale revenues.
Thanks to marketers in the past, festival seasons are known for availing sales and exciting offers. Consumers stall their purchases hoping that brands will bring out some exciting offers.
Amazon’s Great Indian festival and Flipkart’s big billion days is estimated to generate around $4B online festival sales.
This shows that Indian consumers eagerly wait for festive seasons to make a purchase.
We at Radon Media understand the marketing dynamics and curated this blog to help brands scale their revenue by driving festival marketing campaigns. The marketing campaigns driven during festival seasons are short term and hence should be treated accordingly.
The Festival Marketing Checklist – If you are looking ahead to scale your revenue this festive season, you need to be thoroughly prepared. Write down a checklist of basic goals and assets.
Review Your Current Stats – Review your current marketing campaigns and ROI to ensure you are on the right path. Knowing your current state would help you set goals to achieve during the festive marketing campaign.
Determine What Works – Analyze your past marketing campaigns and determine what works best for your brand. You need to choose one strategy and push all your marketing efforts to make it successful.
Set Your Goals – After you analyzed your current position you need to set goals to achieve a specific target. Goals are business-specific but mostly related to sales during festival seasons.
Gather Your Assets – Gather all your marketing assets and check where you can engage your audience effectively. Video marketing is on the rise so make sure you have incorporated some part of the budget for videos.
Growing Trend of Online Shopping During Festive Season
Image credit – statista
As you can see from the above statistics, E-Commerce in India is rising and even brands create their strategy around festival seasons to boost their revenue.
This is true for all kinds of business, especially fashion, real estate and automobiles sector.
So let’s discuss how you can leverage your web properties and digital marketing services to scale your revenues.
PPC Guide for Holiday Marketing –
Speaking of instant results, Google Ads is the best way to scale your revenue. Like we mentioned before, festival season is not long-term and there is only a short span window open and you need platforms which could drive instant results. People eagerly wait for holiday sales and usually starts their research through Google. If your brand could easily capture their attention, this will surely boost your digital marketing campaigns.
1) Review Your Previous Campaigns –
Reviewing your previous campaigns is a great way to start your research. Analyze your last holiday campaigns and the campaigns you ran through the year and try to answer these questions
● Which channels worked best? Is the google search campaign? Display ads or remarketing?
● Which creative was most impactful?
● Which segment of the audience performed better?
● Where did you lack with respect to competitors?
2) Choose Your Channels and Test a Few Experiments –
Although you can repeat what worked throughout the year but it is also wise to test a few ideas before you launch your holiday marketing campaign. Digital platforms evolve very quickly and what worked last year may not produce the same results again.
Allocate a small percentage of your budget to test a few creative ideas including new platforms, channels, strategies and tools. You may end up discovering something unique to incorporate into your strategy.
3) Build Your Funnels –
As you think of building your strategy, keep in mind that festive season invites a lot of new visitors. People who usually don’t shop your products but are rather gift-givers. You need to build a strategy to move these new prospects down the funnel. The festive season sale is one of the opportunities to gain new customers.
Engaging your new audience is done by providing good user experience. Your returning customers are well aware of your policies but with new customers, you need to earn their trust by assisting them throughout the sales funnel.
4) Start Building Your Audience –
Think about the list of audience you have and also the one you wish to build through the holiday marketing campaign.
Example of New Prospects may include
● People who recently viewed your product offers
● People signed up for loyalty programs
● People signed up for newsletters
● Past purchasers
● frequent purchasers
● High-Value customers
Besides building your audience you need to create a strategy to leverage the new audience on different platforms before launching the festival campaigns. If the percentage of people viewing your product offers is too high, try hiring remarketing services to re-engage those customers and drive conversions.
5) Get in Front of First Time Buyers –
As I already mentioned, the festive season opens new opportunities to target those who usually don’t purchase a product. I know it is daunting to target the new segment who may or may not purchase your product but there are a few ways you can accomplish without wasting your marketing spends.
With the audience you have built, you can add additional keywords to your google ads campaign and expand your keyword list into broader areas than you were previously targeting.
You can use display ads with attractive offers to lure the new customers associated with your product in some or the other way.
You could target a few people through Google search campaigns by targeting those who recently been browsing holiday-related items and therefore is in the mindset to purchase.
6) Drive Brand Engagement –
With holiday and festival season around the corner, it is a great time to build the momentum around your brand.
As mentioned earlier, first-time buyers are in huge numbers during the holiday season and hence your brand must provide some incentives to capture their attention. As Indian consumers eagerly wait for brands to bring some new offers, any marketer leveraging this curiosity will swing the momentum towards their brand.
7) Get creative with your ads and Landing pages –
As the holiday season approaches, every brand tries to grab the maximum attention and it gets difficult to separate yourself through the clutter. One of the best ways to accomplish that is through creative ads. It becomes more important when you are trying to convince someone unfamiliar with your brand to make their first purchase.
If done right, creative ads could be fun and clever. They could drive huge user engagement and possible conversions. Creative ad coupled with a neatly designed landing page will move the customers through your sales funnel. The landing page must be relevant to your offer, your ad, your product and the brand. Beyond creative ads, you could create gift guides around your product. This will help you to distinguish your regular customers from the first time buyers.
8) Create a Promo Strategy –
The number one reason why consumers wait for festival season is that brands come up with exciting offers on various products or services. This is what makes the festival marketing campaigns so special. They are short-termed and customers look forward to saving some money.
Some of the promo offers may include
● Early Bird discounts
● A percentage off on certain items
● A free gift upon spending a certain amount
● Free shipping
● Special deals for loyal members
Radon Media’s PPC strategy resulted in a 150% increase in Sales and 146% increase in ROI.
Social Media Strategy for Holiday Marketing –
Social media is the best platform to market your festival offers, This is where most of our audience resides. People are heavily engaged on social media and if you could tap into their emotional connection, you could create a compelling marketing strategy.
Here are a few things you could implement in your Holiday social media strategy to attract both your loyal customers and new prospects.
The key is to engage your followers and get your marketing activity in front of enough people. This can be achieved by paid ads.
1) Update Your Profile –
This is the first, easiest and the obvious move. You need to decorate your timeline with something thematic to your brand and the festival you are marketing.
Simply update your cover photo and profile picture to reflect the holiday.
For your cover photo, you could replace your normal photo with the one you representing your promotional offer or a holiday-themed graphic.
2) Festival Themed Content –
There is literally an infinite number of topics you could come up with respect to promote your brand around the festival. You could write a long-form post and share it on social media or designs graphics for posting it on social media. Either way, it should be something relevant to both your brand and the festival.
You need to dig deep into your previous social media strategy and see what kind of people is going to make people discuss about your brand?
Or you could check out what your competitors are doing and try to beat that. The content you share depends on the holiday and the product you are marketing. Social media is something where people come to seek entertainment. If your brand could do something quirky, it has the highest chance of gaining engagement.
3) Create a Holiday Inspired Contest –
The best way to engage your target audience is to create a fun activity around your blog It could be anything from inventing a hashtag on twitter, online polls on Facebook or a caption contest on Instagram. This way you could make your customer aware of your brand and later reward someone with a gift as a goodwill gesture. This will help you develop a positive image around your brand.
4) Paid Advertisement –
There was a time when a post used to gather hundreds ok like with s=just organic traffic. But that’s not the case today. Today your brand must be equipped to handle paid promotion or you can hire a digital marketing agency who is equipped with social media tools. Your holiday social media marketing strategy should include paid promotions as it becomes easier to target your core audience and also reach maximum people.
Creating a Content Strategy for Festival Marketing Campaigns
Whether it’s a holiday season or any other day, content always helps you gain attention and stand out from the competition.
If you really want to nail your holiday marketing campaigns you must really work well on your content strategy months before its execution. Having a content plan months ahead ensures that you do not stress at the last minute.
Its seems daunting to create strategy a few months ahead but I will list some tips following which you can plan out your content marketing strategy for festival campaigns.
1) Try to Anticipate the Trends/Problems –
The festival comes around every year, so whether you have been a business owner or just a consumer, you must have noticed some trends in the festival marketing campaigns. Whether it’s about creative ads or some technical specification, you will find some of the other things that are trending.
By staying in tune with the trends, you can create a content strategy by better anticipating future trends.
Trends like…
Do you need a separate strategy for mobile devices?
Is your target audience searching for gift guides?
What is stopping them buying your product?
With stats, you can start creating content to lure those customers in your sales funnel.
Take Customer Survey
If you are unsure about what your customer wants and wish to avoid all the guesswork, You could ask someone who is an expert in knowing what they want – audience themselves.
Many digital marketers skip this important step even while planning their regular content strategy. Just ‘assuming’ what they want could hurt your marketing campaigns.
The best way to know is to ask them directly.
Prior to holiday marketing, send your audience a survey form asking what kind of content or offers they would like to see during the holidays.
This may not give you a clear idea but combining the answers with your brainstorming sessions could help you create a content strategy audience is waiting to see.
Further, taking a survey is a great way to tell that you care about your customers.
2) Activate Creative Content Planning –
Once you decide to launch your festival marketing campaign, you need to activate your creative content planning. You have a chance of doing something out-of-the-box and standing out from your competitors. You can play around with holiday related themes and keywords around different advertising platforms.
What topics or theme would you choose to grab the audience’s attention?
How much time do you need to execute a fruitful strategy?
Try to add seasonal photos and content to make it relevant.
Have a brainstorming session with your team and see what you can come up with.
Conclusion –
Holidays and festivals are a great avenue for brands to showcase their creativity and gain new customers. People are eager to buy new products and you need to cater to their needs effectively. The tips I listed will surely help you create stellar marketing campaigns.
