Holiday planning is upon us (and it couldn’t come sooner)! Your holiday digital strategies are more important than ever. According to Google, in 2014, 40% of all holiday shopping happened online and 48% of holiday shoppers did the majority of their shopping before Cyber Monday. These trends are expected to increase and start earlier this year.
Content marketing (still king) is a hot digital trend in ecommerce that should be at the forefront of your holiday strategies. Consumers are demanding personalized information, inspiration, and entertainment in order to make better buying decisions. In 2014, 80% of people who watched online videos to help with their holiday shopping watched product reviews and ratings. Incorporating content into your overall strategy (sooner rather than later) is essential to making your holiday a success.
Here are 3 content marketing tactics to use this holiday season:
- User-Generated Content – This unpredictable marketing tactic is more than a buzz word. It is a way to connect with your consumers on a personal level. Think about the invaluable beacon of information that can come from holiday wish lists! Not to mention, the immense power of social influencers who share popular items, personal wish lists, and pictures of themselves using catchy hashtags.
- Content Promotion – Creating good content is no longer good enough. More than 2.73 million blog posts are written and published on a daily basis. Consumers are inundated with information. Promoting and distributing content is critical to your brand’s content marketing success.
- Video Production – By 2017, video is expected to account for 69% of all internet traffic. If you haven’t started thinking about video production, now is the time. Product reviews and ratings videos were at the forefront of last year’s holiday video consumption, but this isn’t the only way to incorporate video into your digital marketing strategy. Holiday shopping provides the perfect framework for video marketing. Consider a video message wrapped in an exciting, touching, and emotional gift for consumers to connect with, share, and follow through to transaction. WestJet did this with their Christmas Miracle video growing their subscribers 320% in the first 3 days post video launch. They are now the preferred Canadian airline.
Now is the time to bring these tactics to the forefront of your holiday planning strategy so that your season can be a success!
