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SEO in the Snow – Christmas Marketing Campaigns

November 10, 2017

It’s that time of the year again when you collect your thoughts and start getting ideas together ready for Christmas. Some companies keep it simple by making quick changes to logos and banners to get their social pages and websites ready for the festive season. Others do much more. Christmas is a time for giving and as such it’s a perfect time for brands to get their products and services in front of eager shoppers. Personally, Christmas is my favourite time of the year and it is certainly full of cheer – meaning I’m usually the first one to volunteer to put together Christmas marketing campaigns even months in advance!

Things to consider for your Christmas campaigns

Creating campaigns around the Christmas period presents a range of challenges that you need to take into consideration. If your brands been running for a while you have a good idea of your usual audience demographics and how to target them. This presents an issue in the way that few people buy things for themselves around this period, and instead you need to target the family and friends of this audience. This is easily achievable with powerful targeting on platforms such as Facebook. It’s all about putting in the time to do your research into this new audience – and it’s simpler than you think.

Soon, you’ll hit your second challenge. How do you make your brand stand out from the crowd? With everyone offering massive discounts plus savings and wooing people with their own Christmas campaigns – you need to make sure yours is special and is going to reach the people you want it to.

The best Christmas marketing campaigns

When I think of Christmas marketing campaigns, I think of John Lewis. A few of us in the office have already watched the John Lewis Christmas advert for 2017, meaning the Christmas period has well and truly started. My favourite one of all time was definitely the Man On The Moon – proven by the fact I remember the advert down to the finest detail even two years later.

There are various reasons that this is my favourite campaign. I can remember how it made me feel at the time and I still feel the same when I watch it now. I can remember where I was sat when I first watched it, and the way my coworker cried at the thought of the old man sat up there all by himself – connected by a simple telescope. John Lewis is very clever in the way that they pulled at everyone’s heartstrings and made the whole advert memorable. The smile on the old man’s face to the tear that rolls down his cheek as he discovers the little girl who sent it. All accompanied by the message “Show someone they’re loved this Christmas” which hits deep.

How to create the ultimate Christmas campaign

Taking all the above into consideration, it’s time to tackle how you’d start a Christmas campaign and what assets you need before you start. Most of us don’t have a million pound plus budget or team of ten people who are dedicated to working on our Christmas campaigns, yet this doesn’t mean ours can’t be amazing.

Competitions are great. We’ve already spoken about how consumers are ready to stock up on goodies for their loved ones, so offering a hamper or anything that would be a nice gift is sure to go down a treat. They’re usually liked and shared, and although the gift may have cost you £100, the volume of traffic now visiting your social channels and website is worth way more. Once you’ve got people following and looking at your business, it’s time to team up the campaign with some other clever marketing techniques to make them a success.

Using remarketing to recapture your audiences

Remember those pair of shoes you glanced at on ASOS for less than ten seconds that then followed you round on Facebook, Google and pretty much every website you visited since? That’s remarketing at work. Once these people have visited your website – say to look at your competitions terms and conditions or to see if there are more competitions that they could enter, they become a part of your audience that you can retarget to try to convert. Using remarketing is an easy way to put your products and services in front of potential customers who have already shown an interest, for very little cost. Allowing your campaigns to follow people around the internet also gives that user the impression that your company is a lot bigger than it actually is, due to your brand presence being everywhere.

Wait, this blogs meant to be about SEO in the snow?

I was getting to it! No matter what campaign you’ve decided to go with, SEO is always going to be at the heart of it. Any extra traffic acquired through competitions, social channels or any other sources are a massive tick for your SEO. The main ranking metrics these days include direct traffic to the site, time on site, pages per session and bounce rate – all which can only be improved by giving your users no reason to go anywhere else because everything they need to know is right there on your website.

Remember that every good marketing campaign is supported by a landing page. Did you think John Lewis was sending all that added traffic back to the man on the moon!? Of course not – they had a dedicated landing page designed to capture anyone searching for the campaign online, that then had a call to action to buy nice things for your Grandad. Now that’s smart. Of course, other companies are going to try to piggyback off the back of any good campaign, so it’s important you create your landing page as soon as possible and make sure it’s optimised to allow you to rank in position one for terms related to your campaign. Using different types of content throughout the page such as images and videos will also help to support the feel of the page and encourage users to stay on it longer to explore, or encourage them to go and have a look at other parts of the site.

No matter which way you go about, use all the channels you have available to you. Do you have an email marketing list of over 25,00 leads? Great – use it! Do you have a bit of budget you can dedicate to a PPC campaign? Get bidding! The more you put into your Christmas campaign the more you’ll get out of it. If you need help creating an awesome Christmas marketing campaign get in touch with our Digital team today.

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