Mistakes To Avoid During Your Holiday Marketing Campaign - Semalt Expert

As we approach the end of the year, we need to start preparing to make exceptional sales. Knowing what to do and doing it right may give you that advantage you need to get and stay ahead of the competition this year and through the new year. 

We love to buy gifts during the holidays, go on vacations, relax, and forget all that we've been through in the past year. While we remember good memories, we try to make better ones as we prepare for the coming year. 

Are you looking to master holiday marketing this year? Here are some mistakes you should avoid. 

Many businesses are still trying to recover post-covid-19. If you're worried about meeting your yearly quota, these festive seasons might be what you need to get back on track. In just a few months, consumers are bound to become more enthusiastic about shopping. This will present an excellent opportunity for brands to boost sales and revenue. 

Did you know that in 2019, consumers spent about $7.4 billion on Black Friday purchases, and this trend is likely to continue as it has in the following years? 

Over the years, we've figured out that directing consumers to the most relevant pages on your site and highlighting your offers is a quick way to get them to make a purchase. The problem most brands face, however, is figuring out how to do this. 

Making good use of targeted landing pages and specific offers can help you attract customers during the holidays. It isn't necessary to redesign a major portion of your site just because of a holiday, but using specific landing pages can help keep your content fresh, relevant, and timely while making your site look like it was specifically designed for that holiday. 

Here are a few tips we can use:

Try to keep the design consistent with the larger site

Include links or navigation that will lead the readers back to the main site. 

Create holiday offers that will be displayed on the landing pages, main pages, or banners. 

Can you say with absolute certainty that your consumer experience is the best it can be? Being overconfident about this metric can jeopardize your holiday growth plans, so you must be absolutely certain if your answer to the previous question was YES. 

One area that usually needs improving when targeting holiday consumers is the consumer experience. It is critical to walk through the sales process from start to finish as if you were a new customer checking out the brand. 

Doing this has proven to be extremely useful as you get to see the gaps that exist in your conversion process. You may also notice areas you can work on and improve. For example, you may discover new ways to improve the navigation of your site. Categorizing items in a better manner means that they become easier to find, which improves user satisfaction. 

Ensure that all parts of the checkout process work as they should on both mobile and desktop devices.

Many brands ignore checks like this until the holidays are at the corner, which forces them to work with limited time. You'll want to do this ahead of the holiday period so that you have sufficient time to test these pages before launch. 

If you want these improvements to improve your SEO performance, you should make them months ahead of time so that the search engine recognizes and indexes these changes. Your brand will also rank higher, which will make you more visible to customers when they search online. 

If you're reading this, then you want to have as many consumers as possible passing through your site. For this to happen, you must be well equipped to accommodate the load that comes with it. 

Your website needs to load quickly before your visitors lose interest. We can do this by making sure your servers are fully equipped and your website is on a hosting plan strong enough to handle higher than normal levels of web traffic. 

Being optimized for mobile search opens your brand up to big opportunities. As the festive seasons come upon us, consumers are more likely to make last-minute purchases and orders using their mobile devices. 

As a result of the pandemic, consumers are more likely to make their Christmas purchases online, and with a majority of internet traffic coming from mobile devices, you expect that most purchases will come from mobile devices. 

Having good mobile experiences is likely to improve your odds of converting the traffic flowing through your site. We also know that Google prioritizes mobile-optimized sites in its SERPs. Being one of these sites means you get to rank higher and stand a better chance at attracting more traffic. 

In short, make your website great on both mobile devices and desktops for consumers. 

Voice search may not be as prominent as we hoped it would be, but that doesn't mean we can ignore it without any downside. While voice search hasn't been used as wed as in many areas, we still notice its prominence in searches like recipe and entertainment, which are both quite common during the holiday season. 

It is important that you consider how to optimize your site and product pages for Siri, Alexa, and Google Home. It would be beneficial to answer questions about product use, FAQs which can be used as featured snippets by applying the right kind of structured data and fully answering questions your consumers have in a natural way. Keeping your answers as natural as possible makes it easier to optimize for voice search. 

It is important that you do not ignore other holidays. Festive seasons like Christmas and Thanksgiving come with the biggest buzz but other festive seasons are still relevant. 

Not all of your customers celebrate Christmas and Thanksgiving, so you should be sensitive and remember to design messages accordingly. If you're a localized brand, then things will be a lot easier to handle. You will know which celebrations are most important. 

When you're dealing with an international audience, you'll want to do a lot more research on which festive seasons are most important to which regions. Then, you design well-intentioned mass emails around the holidays. 

There is a lot of competition in the e-сommerce market between Black Friday / Cyber Monday and New Year. Rember that not only the big holiday's matter. Smaller holidays do have an impact and play a vital role in your brand. Take World Gin Day, for example; it may not make sense to celebrate in many companies, but for a Gin producing company or distillery, this is Christmas. In cases like this, you can focus on this holiday even if no one else has a voice and focus your brand on presenting it in a fun, fresh, and interesting. 

Yes, this might be effective in getting you to sell more products, but in the long run, practices like this will hurt your brand. No one will remain loyal to a brand that makes them feel bad and then use that to force consumers to buy their products. 

Instead, it would be best if you focused on the good things about your brand. By focusing on why your brand stands out from others, it will be easier to maintain increased returns even after the holidays. Focus on what you can do to improve the situation of your consumers. Ultimately, your brand should be the solution your consumers crave.

Holiday marketing can be a big opportunity for any brand looking for a way to drive sales. Many consumers are aware of this and look for new brands that offer deep discounts and exciting offers. All brands do this, so simply doing the same thing everyone else is doing won't really help you stand out. 

With the tips you've just read, you now know which holiday marketing mistakes you should avoid, and by doing so, you will help your brand stand out even in a crowded marketplace and make sales.  

Interested in SEO? Check out our other articles on the Semalt blog.