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Posted by Sanket Patel
December 23, 2016
While you are enjoying the delicious hors d’oeuvres, various beverages and friendly banter in your pre-Christmas festivities, I’d like you to spare a thought for the most over-worked, humble hero – spam filter.
With every passing year, this modest workhorse has to shovel away the year-round’s deluge of promotional waste flipped into your email inbox so you don’t have to drown in a gloopy Christmas marketing rubbish.
After all, Christmas is the time to give, not to sell!
So, don’t be one of those brands that load up annoying promotional noises.
Stop focussing on your consumer’s back pocket, concentrate on what they would actually like your brand do to help them.
Your content should be something that your customers are actually looking for.
A ‘thanks’ in reply should be your target KPI.
So this Christmas, you should develop helpful, inspirational and entertaining content and show your subscribers how much you care.
Talking about content marketing, we usually think of the content that is created by the business, but we often overlook the most potential thing – the user-friendly content or the customer-created content which can also be called as social content.
We’ve got 5 festive content marketing ideas to help you start delighting your visitors:
-> Everyone loves advent calendars. It’s really a fun time when you get a surprise behind every window.
The giddy excitement of opening that little riddling cardboard window every morning of the December month; to eagerly see the Christmas delight is just awe-inspiring.
Why not associate this concept with a daily image treat on your social networking channels. If you feel this idea good-to-go, you can prepare an email advent calendar series with a different blog article for each of the 25 days.
Additionally, you can include a combination of influencer interviews, gift ideas, product highlights, Christmas stories, or a valuable content from other sites too.
This will give your subscribers a strong purpose to continually open your emails, read your content and re-engage with your brand in the lead up to Christmas but this requires to make sure that your content is genuinely valuable and helpful, not annoying and promotional. Such that, even Santa will sign up for a better and engaging content.
-> Another great idea is producing a guide for the Holidays which has tips on how to make the ultimate cookie hacks from an expert chef, Rob Roy, Tree decorating advice, DIY ornament how-to’s, and even a downloadable holidays playlist. Such supreme free content will be opened by every subscriber, so each of this articles can be broken up into a daily Christmas send.
-> One more concept to reach the customer friendliness heights is giving away prizes every day during the festive season. And it would be icing on the cake if you greet every new customer with an amazing consolation prize, sparking their interest to revisit the site and check out your campaign.
-> Another advent calendar using Twitter : Create an advent calendar on a specially organized twitter handle for an inspiring Christmas contest. Post a new photo every day until Christmas or New Years’, and offer your fans a chance to win a new prize daily. This would encourage user generated content as the followers will be posting picture using the #advent and you’ll give them a chance to win the prize of the day.
The Festival of Christmas is all about giving warm hugs and fuzzies. Everyone loves to get personal during Christmas. It’s all about showing your loved ones how much you care. Similarly, your brand is also unique. Get cosy with your customers and show your personal attachment with them.
A holiday blog series of articles from your team will help greatly in establishing a personal connection with your subscribers.
Asking your subscribers, their favourite Christmas memories, their family’s plans for celebrating the festival, the best gift they’ve ever received, and their tips, ideas and suggestions for readers.
Every company has a different way to find their target customers and reach out to the existing ones. Some highly depend on their databases; while others value their past purchases. Whatever is your strategy, it is just as important that you focus on your inner marketing message when segmenting customers and crafting a message for them.
With Christmas approaching, every marketer is at a creative zenith and with enough budget on hands, there will be a lot of innovative ideas to attract new customers and engage the existing ones.
It’s great if you subscribe as many retailers as possible and stay in contact with their published content like blogs, email programs, sites and their social profiles. It’s nothing wrong if you consider the most amazing ideas from other best in class retailers.
You can even take the concepts and then reconstruct them to work for your target audience? The hard work is already done for you!
Furthermore, it’s not just your competitors and online retailers who have the best ideas. Research the market Santa-style. Try and keep an eye on everyone to see who’s been naughty and who’s been nice.
Christmas is a time of giving, and just like your friends and family – your brand can also get emotional and sentimental. If your brand really cares about a charitable cause, it’s now the right time to prove it. Leave the cold hard sales for your online competitors; create and run a campaign for Christmas donation.
A simple way to show up your Christmas spirit is – for every item sold, you can promise your customers to give a percentage of revenue, or a free Christmas gift to donate in the charity that your brand and community cares about.
Your customers will thank you for it in the long term.
Though you can make a bunch of your annual sales in the last two months of the year, it’s required to keep your long term perspective goggles firmly attached. Remember, holy festival of Christmas isn’t all about dollars.
Surely, Christmas is also a high traffic time for new visitors, which means you can easily grab the opportunity to snag more email subscribers, and develop long term relationships with helpful, valuable content.
But remember, your business growth is about growing your base of loyal repeat customers. Just for some one-time sales, don’t let your customer-friendliness and trust slip away.
This requires something which shows that you genuinely care about your visitors, not just their pockets. For example, you can create a popover with an effective call-to-action to subscribe for email updates, and offer an ebook, freebies or discounts as a festive incentive.
Finally, building a loyal audience of repeat customers is the sustainable path to your website’s success. So, think the customer first, sales second. Even at Christmas time.
Content Marketing is a year-round approach, not just a Christmas sprint. Simply delighting your customers in the last two months will not give your business a right direction.
In a nutshell, You a true content marketing strategy is the one that attracts, converts and retains more customers with unique, useful and valuable content – all throughout the year.
