The holidays are just around the corner, which means it’s time to step up your marketing game for high season. Many companies start their holiday social media campaigns as early as October, but have no fear, by following this checklist your social media engagement strategy will be ready to go long before you solidify your Thanksgiving guest list.
Spread the holiday cheer.
Holidays oftentimes mean hassle. Disrupt the stress by giving your followers a reason to smile. OfficeMax wears the holiday marketing crown for creating the first viral christmas meme with Elf Yourself. It’s been a decade since the big box company started its popular marketing campaign, and even now that we’re saturated with clever vines and snapchats everyday, Elf Yourself remains a holiday classic, so much so that people in all 196 countries have elf-ed themselves. During the holiday seasons from 2006-2011 alone, consumers spent the equivalent of 7,124 years on the company’s Elf Yourself website. What makes OfficeMax’s campaign so effective is that it is personal, hilarious, and it’s a gift that keeps on giving because you can endlessly test out how ridiculous each of your friends looks in Will Ferrell’s green tights. By making customers laugh, you lead them to develop a positive emotional connection to your brand and a loyalty to your product.
Start a dialogue.
Don’t just launch giveaways or contests this season, initiate discussions among your users. Ask them to post favorite holiday activities, party tips, or photos of them using your products in an inventive way. A great way to foster conversations is through creative hashtags on Twitter and Instagram, so get to the drawing board to brainstorm ways to combine your company name or motto with something festive and catchy. By soliciting user feedback and then following up with personalized replies, you humanize your brand, signal that you care about your customers, and show that your company is committed to making their holiday season as enjoyable as possible.
Help consumers “gift better.”
On a similar note, your social media campaign should aim to help make life easier for consumers. J. Crew has done a phenomenal job boosting its brand exposure while helping stressed out buyers with its “Gift (Better) Guides” on Pinterest. Depending on your brand and products, Pinterest may not make sense for your marketing strategy, but you should nevertheless follow J.Crew’s lead by finding ways to supply your followers with helpful tips and tricks to survive this holiday season. For instance, you can tweet holiday-hacks or link to how-to guides for getting through your third social event of the night. Last year, Stubhub encouraged people to share their ideal ticket gift using the hashtag #tixwish as way to enter a giveaway contest with a grand prize of $10,000 on New Year’s Eve. This was a win-win situation for everyone involved. Someone won big, everyone else got to let their friends and family know exactly what tickets they really wanted as stocking stuffers, and Stubhub gathered over 500,000 mentions on twitter. By using your social media networks to help people simplify their gifting process, you’ll be sure to make followers think of you as Santa’s helper rather than just another holiday spammer.
Invest in a social media management app.
Once you’ve planned your holiday marketing strategy, you need to make sure you’re targeting the right audience at the right time to yield the strongest user engagement. This is where data analytics come in. If you don’t already use a social media dashboard, you’ll make your life a whole lot easier by investing in one to help you this season. Hootsuite and Buffer are two of the most popular social management apps, helping you better understand your audience, the platforms they use most, and the times of day they are most likely to interact with your posts. By analyzing your post engagement history and audience behaviors, these dashboards will help you decide which social media platforms and types of holiday messages will resonate most with your specific target audience. You don’t want to find out after the season that most of your followers are in an entirely different timezone than you thought so your midnight “Happy New Year” actually came at 6 AM. No one wants to hear from you then.
Upgrade your design to keep engagement up after New Year’s.
At the end of the day, you don’t just want users to think fondly of your company because you had a great holiday marketing campaign. You want to keep the traffic up long after the holiday cheer dies down. A great way to achieve this is to take the long view when planning your holiday marketing campaign, focusing not just on grabbing people’s attention on social media, but by upgrading their experience once they’ve landed on your homepage. Use this holiday season as an opportunity to freshen up your website and app, making the user experience more intuitive and enjoyable. The best way to differentiate your online presence is to hire a designer. Toptal is your one-stop shop when it comes to finding expert help and opinions. If you don’t have design experience and aren’t exactly sure what you’re looking for, check out the company’s guides for hiring UI designers and UX designers.
Conclusion:
Nailing your holiday social media strategy is all about finding creative opportunities to better connect with your customers in a way that makes sense for your brand. The best holiday strategies are the ones that add value to user experience, be it through entertainment or stress-relief and holiday-hacks. Whatever strategy you employ, make sure your message is in line with your longer term marketing goals so that you don’t grab followers’ attention for Christmas and lose them by New Year’s Day.
from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/1kpk4du via transformational marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1On3TKM
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