Soon, the holiday season will begin. It’s time to prepare your small business for the influx of customers. To stay profitable during the busy holiday shopping season, you must promote your small business and its products. You can do a variety of things to improve your chances of success, starting from developing a content marketing plan, leveraging digital channels, to keeping up with social media trends. It can be challenging for a small business owner to find the time to evaluate all of these marketing tactics. To ensure that you have a good holiday season, I’m going to provide you with five practical digital marketing tips.
1) Fix the Fundamentals of Your Website
A website should be fast and responsive. This will allow the visitors to use your website easily and quickly. To make sure that your website is fast, you need to focus on its fundamentals. You may not have the budget of a bigger, national, or international firm, but you could at least get the basics right. You have to balance page load speed and rich content. You can do this by not overloading your pages with too many images, videos, or large files. Make sure that you have a good hosting company, and use caching plugins on your site. In a Google study, it is mentioned that 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load. Google’s data reveals that for websites with high page load time, the mobile conversion rates are lower than desktop rates, even though mobile accounts for more than half of all website visits. In essence, revenue is inversely correlated with mobile page speed.
Avoid keyword stuffing! Keyword stuffing is a bad habit that many website owners possess. This bad habit causes your website to be spammy and spamming search engines with too many irrelevant keywords.
2) Share Your Brand’s Story in Your Original Content
Marketing is changing. The days of aggressive sales are over. To sell your products and services in 2022, storytelling will be crucial. Invest in design and content that tell the story of your brand and you’ll find it easier to build trust with consumers. The most successful brands have a story to tell about themselves. They understand their customer’s needs and wants, and they know how to translate those into a compelling narrative that resonates with their audience. To be successful in this new marketing environment, you will need to shift your focus from selling products to telling stories that resonate with customers on an emotional level. Show your potential clients how your solution has assisted customers in resolving a specific issue that they were having.
We need to think about how to generate original content. If you are the founder of the business you can start by telling your brand story in your voice. Every business starts from an idea shaped by identity, culture, and competitive environment. A brand’s origin story fosters a connection with consumers and potential consumers in a manner that conventional advertising cannot. Brand’s origin stories are built on four pillars, read this blog to learn more.
We should not forget that the goal of any marketing campaign is to get people to buy your products or use your services. This is why brands need to create videos that are engaging and informative. It will help them connect with their audience and make their message more memorable. Choosing what story to tell is the hardest part of using video for marketing.
Requesting your customers for video testimonials is a good way to get them involved in the process and build a stronger relationship with them. They will feel like they are part of something bigger than just a customer-company relationship.
3) Make the Unboxing Experience Memorable To Spread the Word
The holiday is predominantly a gift-giving season. The presentation of a gift is just as important as the item itself. A growing number of retail and e-commerce firms are making every effort to make the process of unpacking their products as exciting as possible. The user-generated unboxing videos routinely receive millions of views on YouTube.
Your brand’s packaging should be durable, simple to open, and whenever possible, attempt to include a lovely small token of appreciation to create a memorable unboxing experience. Using branded stickers, premium packaging materials, and handwritten special messages for the gift recipient are a few examples of how to achieve this.
A thoughtful and well-designed unboxing experience will keep your brand top-of-mind. It will also encourage many of the recipients of the gift package to share the memorable moment with their social media followers, boosting the buzz surrounding your brand.
Galen Leather sells leather goods handmade in Turkey. To complete the brand experience and make reference to the products’ origins, the company surprises its customers by giving away complimentary gifts from Turkey.
Influencer marketing will prove to be the fastest-growing customer acquisition marketing tactic and the best way to expand your small business brand if you have little user-generated content. Small businesses can benefit from micro-influencers, who have smaller, but more loyal followings. Micro-influencers usually charge less and are reasonable for almost any budget. Here’s an example of a micro-influencer appreciating the packaging of Screaming Mandrake Perfume on her blog.
4) Utilize Artificial Intelligence to Your Advantage
One problem with growing business is that it takes a long time to know who your customer is and what they want. This can be solved by using AI-based tools. Online retail is one of the most competitive industries in the world. With so many players, it is crucial to use AI to your advantage. AI can be used to automate and make informed decisions in milliseconds. It can also provide you with the data of your potential customers which will help you understand them better and make a better decision when it comes to marketing strategies.
To advertise on Google Search and its partner website, Google Ads is an AI-powered platform that has been used by many businesses. It can be used to automate campaigns and bidding. It uses machine learning to predict which customers are most likely to buy a product or service, and then it automates the bidding process. The AI in Google Ads is constantly learning, so it’s always getting better at predicting which customers are likely to buy a product or service. This allows for more precise bidding, which leads to more conversions for digital marketers. The same is true for Facebook, Microsoft Advertising, Amazon Advertising, and many other platforms. The automated paid media campaigns allow for a much more personalized experience for the customer, as well as allow for a higher return on investment from each marketing campaign.
5) Retargeting Through Email Marketing Is the Most Effective
The most tried-and-true and effective digital marketing tactic is email marketing. Have you ever questioned why this approach is still relevant today? One major factor is that social media content is frequently heavily filtered, which prevents it from reaching the target customers. Emails, on the other hand, engage with the user directly without the risk of being missed because of privacy or filter concerns.
Retargeting your past customers through personalized email marketing is the most effective. By sending them emails with some of the products they had abandoned in the cart or had purchased last holiday, you increase the chances of them coming back and purchasing them. In this day and age, people are constantly bombarded with information, so it is important to be persistent when trying to get their attention.
Offering discounts to your past customers is another effective way to increase sales. In this way, you will be able to recoup more revenue from a sale that was otherwise lost.
BONUS! Google My Business Listing Puts You in Front of Shoppers
A business with a physical store front can gain extensive online visibility and credibility using Google My Business. Why is it crucial? Google indicates that people visit 1.5 billion locations each month using Google searches, and 76% of those who search for something nearby visit that business within a day. You must strive to create a strong online presence for your business so that it can be found when potential customers search online for the products or services you offer.
In conclusion, holiday shopping is a competitive market that often presents significant barriers to entry. This year most retailers are promoting deals sooner as the post-pandemic slump will cause high competition during holidays. So what are you waiting for? It is important not to get confused because there is an overwhelming amount of articles, videos, and eBooks discussing numerous ways to boost holiday sales for your small business. Get started now by implementing these 5 tips, and see how they work out for your business!
