This document provides a marketing strategy and action plan for the holiday season. It recommends breaking the plan into four units: messaging, timing, pricing, and marketing tactics. For messaging, it suggests focusing on value, emotions, and urgency. For timing, it advises starting early and rewarding early customers. For pricing, it discusses bundle pricing and dynamic pricing. For tactics, it recommends loyalty programs, coupons, SEO optimization, landing pages, and buyer's guides.

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Marketing Strategy
During the Holiday Season
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2. Marketing Strategy During the
Holiday Season
Now that you’re ready for the holiday shopping rush, what have you done to alert
your shoppers of your sales and promotions? Weeks ahead of the holiday rush, make
sure you’ve created a well-rounded marketing action plan, ensuring that you get the
additional holiday traffic to your ecommerce.
Here's how you can break your marketing plan over the next 4-weeks:
To organize your marketing action plans, break your plan into four units - messaging,
timing, pricing, and marketing tactics.
Messaging Matters
Messaging is what will make your deal stand out and speak to your audience. Keep
the following in mind when honing your message:
Value Comes First: The golden rule of marketing is to- always amplify the value
of the product or service, first and foremost. Black Friday and Cyber Monday
(BFCM) promotions are usually value-based but coupled with how it comes at
the lowest price ever.
Marketing Strategy During the Holiday Season
Week 1 Prepare your marketing plan and create new marketing collateral
in relation to holiday promotions
Week 2 Schedule promotions and offers. Run your marketing engines.
Week 3 Continue promotions and optimize for conversions
Week 4 Follow-up with new offers and extend sales
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3. Leverage Emotions: Your consumers will be exposed to hundreds of ads. Make
your ads stand out by including language that will prompt an emotional
response in your customers. Treat your ads as a medium to talk to real humans
and speak to their desires, wishes, and ambitions. For example, an ad for a
women's sweater can read - “Thank your Mom, for all that she does!” A simple
message like this will prompt users to think about their parents and to
purchase the accompanying product. Tap into the gift-giving holiday season
and the emotions that it brings about.
Establish the Right Kind of Urgency: The key is to establish urgency in a subtle
way to communicate the scarcity of your product or service offer. For example,
“Don't worry, you’ve still got time to shop. The sale will continue through the
evening.” Another way to do this is by placing a countdown timer on your
website which will inform users about the time left for the sale to end, without
the need of highlighting it in your messaging.
Customized and Dynamic Marketing Copy: At every stage of the buyer’s cycle,
there should be marketing copy that is focused on moving them to the next
phase. While your early stage marketing copy is meant to lure your customers
to shop, the late stage copy should be focused on converting your customers
into paying customers. What works in the beginning won’t necessarily work
later on. For instance, when it’s checkout time, your content should reflect on
making it easier to finish the transaction, there’s no need to include copy that
has them going back to browsing your store.
Embrace the Reviews: User-generated content like ratings and reviews play an
important role in shaping perceptions about your products. Shoppers find
reviews to offer authentic thoughts on the quality of products sold online. As a
marketer, you must pay extra attention to this bit and work on resolving any
issues mentioned in the negative reviews and respond to them in a convincing
manner. Doing so will project an earnest effort on your part to resolve any
issues or outstanding questions.
Marketing Strategy During the Holiday Season
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4. Time It Well
Time is always a crucial factor for the high-rush period. These months are marked by
an increased urge in purchase behavior during a certain window of time. People
usually start preparing lists of their purchases months ahead. With the size of the
competition increasing every year, brands have been launching promotions earlier
and earlier, starting as early as September.
Start Early, Finish Strong: Holiday promotions start as early as September for
some brands, while others like to hold back and launch promotions in mid to
late October. Thanks to the pandemic, this year could be a game changer. With
the onset of the season, there are a lot of people looking to start their
shopping even before the BFCM sales kick in.
Reward the Early Bird: Come up with something like early access to the sale in
your announcements preceding the day. Create special promotions for early
shoppers, such as early access to sales, and build a sense of exclusivity to your
most loyal customers.
Right Timing Puts You Ahead of the Game: Amidst the shopping season
planning, this could easily be one of the factors that marketers forget to pay
much attention to. Be mindful of the timing of when your ads are scheduled for
each of your channels including Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, email
marketing, text messages, and push notifications. The better the timing, the
more your messaging will resonate.
Schedule Everything: Set up a simple yet fully functional marketing calendar
outlining the various activities, timelines, stakeholders, discounts, channels,
and other related factors. Having such a document will ensure everything is
being executed on time, and will help keep focus on the bottom line.
Marketing Strategy During the Holiday Season
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5. Playing the Pricing Game
There’s more to pricing than meets the eye. Before even deciding on the pricing,
there’s a lot to consider, including checking the competition, market demand,
inventory stock, production costs, and profit margins. To get started, you need to
understand a few important numbers such as the production cost, overhead cost,
and breakeven cost to arrive at your profit-making pricing. Pricing is an iterative
process that could take some trial and error. Here are a couple of ideas for pricing,
that you can use this holiday season:
Bundle Pricing: Bundle pricing gives the perception of high value and low
pricing when buying certain products together. At the same time, it allows
businesses to keep a decent margin for profit without letting discounts hurt
them. Many businesses use this strategy to push their low selling products
along with in-demand ones. You can also cross-sell or upsell your low-priced
products along with your popular products, encouraging users to add
low-priced products to their cart while checking out.
Dynamic Pricing: For your eCommerce store, dynamic pricing can be deployed
using algorithms and smart software systems. These systems analyze product
popularity, past and market trends, inventory availability, and sales
predictions. Below are some ways dynamic pricing can be implemented:
Marketing Strategy During the Holiday Season
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6. Marketing in Action:
Once you’ve addressed your content, pricing, scheduling and data measurement,
you’re ready for the final execution of your marketing plan. Not all marketing
channels and tactics are equal. While some require more resources, they could help
maximize the reach of your businesses. For beginners, start with calculating the
average cost of acquisition or CAC using the below formula:
Loyalty and Rewards Programs: Drive repeat business through existing
customers by offering loyalty discounts and rewards for their purchases. This
can include special discounts, free shipping, or free gifts with purchases.
Discount Codes and Coupons: It’s no secret that shoppers love discounts. They
work as a great pull for customers to revisit your website, increase the cart size,
and make purchases. For brands, it can result in a good boost in sales and
brand awareness. To make discount codes work for you, you need to make
them easy to find, remember, and use. Make them visible during checkout and
ensure that your customers don’t abandon the cart. Remember to make them
short and simple while creating them like “Holiday2020”, “BlackFriday2020”,
“Thanksgiving2020”, etc.
Marketing Strategy During the Holiday Season
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Marketing Campaigns and Promotions: The most basic rule of success this
holiday season is that shoppers will buy from brands that offer exciting deals
and savings. While you may not be able to offer deals that big brands like
Amazon or Walmart can do, you can still generate excitement around sales in
your eCommerce store using the following options:
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7. Marketing Strategy During the Holiday Season
Optimize SEO: Your SEO strategy is the most important part of your marketing
engine. Having an effective SEO strategy will ensure a steady flow of traffic
from search results. Start by identifying important and relevant keywords for
your products. This needs to be location and demographics specific. Along with
this pay attention to your competitor’s SEO strategy. Tailor your content to
reflect what your customers are searching for, but be mindful that it won’t be
easy to rank for some keywords because of high competition. Use the following
tactics to help boost your SEO:
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8. Marketing Strategy During the Holiday Season
Buyer’s Guides: Make gift-giving an easy task for your customers by creating
several different gift guides, customized for different personas. Not only will
this help curate the best of your products, but this will also help to boost
your SEO by using relevant keywords and detailed product descriptions.
Dedicated Landing Pages: By creating dedicated landing pages for BFCM
deals, you can create an opportunity to add SEO value and highlight
products, collections and offers without changing your main website.
Holiday-Themed Blog Posts: Connect with your shoppers through your blog
by posting about holiday themes that are relevant to both your customers
and to your ecommerce site.
Voice Search: Voice search might seem a bit far off in the future but it's already
being adopted by several ecommerce brands. The ease and immediacy of voice
search has shoppers connecting more with their digital friends, Alexa, Siri, and
Google. Remember when setting up your voice search, there’s a difference in
search behavior when using text and when using voice. For example, a user
would use “best TVs under $300” when typing into search and would say “What
are the best TV options under $300?” while using voice search.
Simplify with Automated Workflows: With so much to be done in such a short
period of time, a robust marketing automation systems can do a lot of heavy
lifting for you by creating workflows for marketing along with handling logistics
like cancellation requests, delivery, return, feedback, and general queries.
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