If you’re going to effectively communicate with your audience, you need to stay on top of their shifting feelings, desires and fears all year round. People are always changing, and so too are society’s values, needs and perspectives.
Just look at the holiday season, for example. Almost one fifth of all retail transactions happen during that time. If you market to your audience the same way during the holiday season as you do the rest of the year, you could be missing out on an enormous chunk of potential profit.
During the holiday season, people’s mindsets and priorities are different, and your messaging should adapt to match.
Unique campaigns and unique data
The holiday season should be treated as its own entity. Don’t simply run the same campaigns you do all year round, and don’t rely on learnings and findings gleaned from the rest of the year’s data.
If you were in business last year, take a look at the data from the holiday season then. What changes did you notice in your audience? What seemed to resonate around that time of year? What worked, and what didn’t?
For your PPC strategy, you’ll want to take special note not only of the keywords and phrasing your audience responds to, but current national / global trends as well. One thing you can do is go to Google Trends and compare common holiday phrases, such as “holiday sale” vs. “Christmas sale”.
Your internal data combined with your Google Trends findings should give you a solid indication of which keywords to prioritise in your PPC strategies, and by extension, where your audience’s heads are at.
Budgeting and general strategy
Given the increased volume of transactions throughout the holiday season, you should expect and be willing to increase your marketing budget in order to reap the full benefit of the increased potential return.
And on particularly popular shopping dates, you’ll want to consider spending quite a bit extra in order to maximise return.
But aside from budget, there are other general considerations to be made as well. What you may find when you do your keyword and Google Trends research is that people tend to shop around the holiday season because of the savings, specials and deals available.
As such, you may want to consider running particular specials and communicating the urgency and time sensitivity of them. Phrases like “limited time only” have stood the test of time for a reason – they make people feel like they’re about to miss out on a big opportunity unless they transact right away.
There are many things you can explore around the holiday season when it comes to your PPC strategy. But the most important thing you can do is be conscious of your audience and what the holiday season means to them. Adapt and prepare for the holiday season, and you’ll be sure to benefit from the higher volume of transactions.
