By Dan Pratt
Sigh. Again it is this time of the year. The abundance of Christmas items that appear on the shelves can only mean one thing: the holidays are sneaking over us.
For many companies, the Christmas season is an incredibly busy season. In fact, so busy that the National Retail Federation (NRF) reports that Christmas time can make up to 30% of annual revenue. , , 30 percent!
The NRF also reports that consumers research their holiday purchases earlier and earlier each year. More than half of consumers research from October or earlier, with 33% of purchases made from November.
With so much at stake, it is imperative that small and medium-sized business owners plan a marketing strategy to take advantage of the onrush of holiday interest as quickly as possible. Continued delays or planning mistakes can lead to a piece of coal in your warehouse.
Let's look at 6 tips to ensure successful digital marketing this Christmas season.
It is important for every business owner to think about what Christmas time will bring. In other words, getting started is an important part of the strategic planning process. What do you hope to achieve this year? Is it higher sales, an increase in brand awareness, the expansion of your existing product line, the development of new sales channels? If you understand what you want to see and achieve by December 31st, you can take the right direction.
After choosing your goals for Christmas, it's important to understand the best methods to measure your success. For most companies, the best first step is to set up Google Analytics to capture all site-related metrics. Most importantly, when you spend money on advertising in Google AdWords or Facebook ads, you can make sure that every conversion pixel is set up correctly and reports exactly what you're aiming for.
You can not improve what you can not measure.
It's more important than ever to be where your customers are, and these customers often sit on their mobile phones. The Comscore Mobile Phone Usage Report 2017 shows that US consumers spend 71% of their minutes online on a mobile device. Terrifyingly, 2016 was the first time that mobile search left the desktop search behind, as consumers are actually searching online for things. A whopping 56% of all retail searches start on mobile devices.
If your website is already optimized for a mobile ecommerce experience, congratulations! That's a small thing to add to your holiday checklist. If this is not the case, you should seriously consider upgrading before it's too late.
There are a number of fantastic platforms that make it easy to set up a mobile ecommerce experience. Shopify, BigCommerce and Magento are three of the best-known services, but a simple Google search for "mobile ecommerce platforms" will discover much more for you.
