According to a recent GoDaddy Venture Forward survey, 42% of US small businesses stated the top challenge in starting a business was marketing their brand online through social media, ads or promotions.
Whether you’re a small business preparing for your first holiday marketing push or a seasoned veteran of the bustling holiday shopping landscape, this time of year presents many challenges and opportunities, no matter where you are in your entrepreneurial journey.
As customers expect more personalized attention from their retailers, and the commerce landscape continues to shift based on ever-changing consumer preferences, entrepreneurs face a new set of marketing challenges with every holiday season. For small businesses with limited budgets, especially when compared to those of big box retailers, navigating the complex and changing digital marketing landscape can feel overwhelming amid other market pressures.
Luckily, there are key marketing strategies that business owners can activate to maximize impact, heighten customer loyalty, and increase sales without draining resources.
Tips to Make Marketing Content Sparkle During the Holidays
Crafting the right holiday content is a powerful way to connect with your target audience during the holiday season and beyond. Today’s consumers prioritize personalization and want brand content to reflect and address the individual needs, desires and struggles they face today.
To make the most of your resources while still surpassing your digital marketing goals, leverage the power of social media to engage with your customers organically, in real time. Using AI-powered tools like Instant Video, you can quickly and effectively meet the growing needs for video-based digital marketing and social commerce – and you can do it free of charge.
When generating content, infographics can be quick attention grabbers – and carousels on Instagram allow you to showcase multiple products and link them to your Instagram Shop for customer ease. You can create beautifully designed content for websites, social media, marketing and more using apps like GoDaddy Studio. Choose from hundreds of templates that make branding and professional assets easy to deploy across all your channels – social, website and email, to name a few – that can help drive customer engagement and sales.
Additionally, consider how to tailor content to the broader holiday season at large. Activating personalized gift guides that showcase your best-selling products or are tailored to specific demographics, such as gearing them towards parents, kids, friends, grandparents or colleagues, makes the shopping experience easier and more fun for your customers – and shows them you understand their needs more personally than other competitors.
Following this exact advice, we created our very own gift guide at GoDaddy this year to use the power of our reach to shine the spotlight on entrepreneurs during the holidays. Our gift guide features our unique and inspiring customers from all over the country – showcasing their best-selling products within a personalized, holiday-centric format. For us at GoDaddy, it’s about highlighting and empowering small businesses through partnered marketing amplification, which is even more pertinent during difficult market conditions this holiday season.
Like the guides produced by our small business partners, we hope the GoDaddy 2023 Gift Guide can help people find gifts for their loved ones, inspire them to shop small throughout the year, and make the shopping experience seamless and fun for all.
Wallet-Friendly Marketing Wonders
Today, a robust online presence bespoke to your target audience is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a non-negotiable. At a time when consumers are in constant contact online, and with Gen Z as a digitally native generation, establishing virtual relationships with customers has become a linchpin of successful digital marketing campaigns and branding today. The need for continuous contact marketing, however, can often feel overwhelming and unapproachable, especially for time-strapped entrepreneurs and their teams.
There’s no need to sweat it, though – while constant engagement is critical, it doesn’t have to be as overwhelming as it sounds. Employing a unified inbox consolidates and organizes customer interactions, reducing confusion and saving you time to get back to the parts of the business you enjoy the most.
As you look to areas where you can expand upon your multifaceted customer engagement, consider how your social channels can further come into play. Across social channels, consider offering pre-holiday promotions, loyalty programs, engaging or helpful content like a tips/tricks and post-holiday incentives to keep customers engaged throughout the year. Promotions can help capitalize on heightened consumer spending, and loyalty programs can help incentivize an ongoing relationship between the business and the customer.
While many might focus on the pre-holiday marketing push, the post-holiday push is equally as important. By continuing to market products after the holiday season, you’re not only building upon newly earned customer loyalty and engagement but mitigating the post-celebratory dip in consumer engagement.
Demystifying SEO to Unravel Business Success
The topics and ways people search for them constantly change, so understanding the routes to achieving optimized SEO is essential to business success. To get started, identify the challenges and what excites your audience – and consider what terms they would use to search for solution-driven insights and products.
Optimize your website content, social media channels, and product descriptions to adhere to and highlight these terms. Additionally, ensure your website is mobile-ready, as mobile optimization is crucial in scoring high on SEO rankings.
By unraveling some of the complexities of SEO, you can significantly improve your visibility and attract the right holiday shoppers on the hunt for your products – even if they don’t know it yet.
While digital marketing during the holidays can feel overwhelming, it doesn’t have to – and once you’ve employed the right tools and tricks in your marketing strategy, you’ll feel empowered to take on the holiday season with confidence.
Interested in shopping small this holiday season, scoring your loved ones the most unique gifts on the market? Check out the GoDaddy 2023 Gift Guide here!
As Senior Director of Integrated Marketing, Amy Jennette leads the U.S. integrated marketing go-to-market strategy. Since joining GoDaddy, Amy’s charter has been to further GoDaddy’s brand reputation. She’s done this by launching GoDaddy’s first-ever brand campaign, Make the World You Want, leading the brand transformation including the GoDaddy mark and the #OpenWeStand movement – securing 70+ partners in response to Covid-19. This, combined with the latest, All the Firsts campaign drove the strongest brand health performance in 5+-years. Twitter
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