Three marketing tactics to increase holiday engagement and sales

Yep, it’s that time again. The holiday season is right around the corner and most businesses are starting their frantic search for ways to increase their sales. With so many options available online for shoppers, it’s easy to get lost in the crowd, so we’ve put together a few marketing tactics to help your business boost its sales this holiday season.

Optimize marketing channels across device

In 2014, 53% of all online shoppers used mobile devices, a 41% increase from 2013. With more and more people doing their shopping on smartphones and tablets this holiday season, marketers must ensure that their channels are optimized in order to engage users across devices. Everything from marketing sites, to email campaigns, to social advertisements, needs to be created with the device that it will be displayed on in mind.  Presenting visually stimulating, legible and interactive marketing campaigns across mobile phones and tablets will absolutely jumpstart sales.

Integrate consumer insights & trends

Increase holiday sales by integrating consumer interest and behavior data into marketing campaigns. Making efforts more relevant requires knowing your audience and what’s on their wishlist, then advertising it. Begin by using Google Analytics to get a basic overview of existing customers and site visitor demographics, then learn what they click on while browsing the site, in addition to the most popular keywords and pages.

After applying existing customer data, integrate insights from broader sources like The New York Times report on Google’s top-trending, gift-related searches for 2014. Use this to determine what these demographics, who are similar to those on your site, are searching for. You can then feature similar “gift list” items in your marketing campaigns, which target your specific demographic. Infusing behavioral and interest data into holiday marketing to boost sales may sound creepy, but more than 50% of consumers are comfortable with a business using that data to provide a better experience – so put it to good use!

Showcase user-generated content

Add user-generated content to upcoming marketing campaigns to jumpstart sales. UGC is consumer-generated videos, photos, comments, that happen to be 20% more influential on purchasing decisions than traditional types of advertising. When consumers see other people like a product, they feel that they will, too. Businesses that use UGC instead of stock photos can improve conversion rates by up to 6.4 percent.

Businesses can spend the weeks leading up to the holiday shopping madness to generate UGC that they can weave into their marketing efforts. Encourage customers to post product reviews and wish lists to social media using a special holiday hashtag. Then repost the best, highest quality UGC across social media channels, spotlight them in blog posts or feature them in email marketing campaigns. If you’re using a visual marketing platform, such as Nicho, consider using ‘buy’ buttons to make the social content on your site shoppable.

There’s a theme running through these strategies – make the foundation of holiday marketing about understanding the customer and delivering a dynamic and personalized experience.  Adapting these tactics will help your business cut through the noise in an ultra-competitive holiday season, on the right device, with the items that customers want and content that inspires them to click ‘buy’.