Are you ready for holiday sales? It’s now time to prepare your content marketing strategy and plans for this year’s sales season.
Perhaps you’re thinking: no way. It’s only July. I’ve got months to get ready…
Uh no. The holiday sales season gets underway by late September, early October—so give yourself eight weeks to complete your content marketing preparations.
Within eight weeks, you’ll not only have prepared marketing strategies and plans for your primary products, you’ll have at least one solid month’s worth of content ready to release. Easy peasy, right?
Relax. There’s no need to panic, but it’s time to get your holiday season content marketing under way.
Your content marketing strategy for the holidays
Consider a three-step process: strategy; planning; and execution. Although it’s useful consider each step discretely, in practice you’ll keep strategizing, planning and executing until next January.
In years past, you could lay out a marketing strategy and follow it with a minor tweak or three. Nowadays, with restrictions and lockdowns and who-knows-what, you need to be alert and ready not merely with a Plan B, but with Plans C, D, and E.
You can do it.
Start with your strategy.
Holiday season content marketing strategy: goals
Creating a content marketing strategy is essential. Basically, it means defining your business goals, then developing plans to use content marketing to help you to achieve those goals.
Expect this to take a little time. You’ll need to research as well as think about your customers and what their needs might be this holiday season and in the coming year.
Planning your content: start with your product sales pages
Once you’ve developed your business goals for the holiday season, it’s time to plan your content marketing to help you to achieve those goals.
Before you get into the weeds of content—blog posts, social media, et al—consider your website’s online store, if you have one, or your primary sales pages.
In Content Marketing, SEO And Websites: 4 Practical Tips To Make Sales, we suggested that you take a leaf from Amazon’s book, so to speak, because:
Every product page on Amazon is designed for customers. Every word and image on each page helps with content marketing and SEO.
Just as Amazon’s set up to SELL, your website needs to be set up to sell too. Look at your sales pages. Do an audit. How do they compare with Amazon’s pages?
If you have hundreds or even thousands of pages, check your search engine rankings—which pages are ranking for you? Next, check your competitors. What are they ranking for, and why?
If your tummy just dropped to your toes, consider that every little helps. Whether you have five sales pages or a thousand, ask questions about your holiday season content marketing strategy:
- What are your goals?
- Which products (or services) will help you to achieve those goals?
- How will you achieve them?
- What will success look like?
When you’re creating content, aim to improve your sales pages (landing pages) at the same time: this process will help increase sales.
Execute your content marketing strategy step by step
Consider creating:
- Broad themes for your holiday season content marketing. Aim for one theme a month, or even one theme a week; this makes creating content and assets (like photos) easier;
- Content for special sales days. These are days that you choose for your promotions;
- Extra content for the “minor” sales days over the months of October, November, December and January— such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, etc.
Sketch out the broad themes for the period, then add those themes to your calendar.
Holiday content marking: set your start and end dates
Nothing happens until you add items to your schedule. Set a start and end date, and start adding.
Remember to have fun over the holiday season too. 🙂
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Copywriter and marketing pro Angela Booth maintains a busy copywriting and ghostwriting practice. Fascinated by online marketing, she wrote one of the first business books for internet marketing, published by Allen & Unwin. She’s been an enthusiastic blogger since the late 1990s.
