Just like you decorate your home for the holidays, you also need to do some extra work on your website to get ready for the holiday shopping season. You shouldn’t be just leaving your website alone in general anyway, and the methods you learn for getting the word out about your holiday offers, are tactics you can use for other offers and campaigns throughout the year.
1. Holiday Website Housekeeping
Before you add any extra graphics, banners, webforms, etc. for the holidays, you want to make sure you do a bit of online housekeeping on your website, and by extension, your online citations, and your Google My Business (GMB) listing too. What does that mean?
Clean up your NAP
Your NAP is your business name, business address, business phone number, and business URL. Make sure it’s on every page of your site, including your homepage, and ensure it’s up to date on your GMB listing too. Also, check that it’s consistent and correct across all other places it’s mentioned online. Depending on your industry, that might be a lot of sites, and you can get help.
Update your Business Hours
If your business hours change during the holidays, update them on your website and your Google listing, as well as any directory sites where you list your business.
Consider Special Holiday Website Visuals and other messaging
It’s an excellent idea to give your website and blog graphics a holiday look and feel with things like holiday banner, or a special holiday color schemes.
2. Create Holiday Campaign Content
Now that your website is clean, you can start your holiday “decorating.” In other words, you can start creating and publishing content like blogs, videos, guides, and different types of content that informs and educates customers about your holiday specials, offers, and events. That includes things like what your company has planned for Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, and any other special holiday shopping days.
Some small businesses also like to emulate larger organizations by creating exclusive holiday-themed videos, ads, and other content. The key, though, is always remembering that whatever content you create, it should always be with your customers in mind. If your target audience likes funny holiday content, then create some. If they’re a bit more bah humbug, then don’t go too over the top with your holiday messaging.
3. Add Your Holiday Hook to Your Web page
After you’ve cleaned the house, decorated your website, and created website and campaign content, you can start thinking about adding new holiday offer banners, boxes, and webforms. Have a Black Friday special discount you want to offer to the first 100 people who sign up? Add a signup box to one side of your website pages or your blog posts.
4. Get Your Customers Involved
Don’t forget your existing customers. With any offer, special, discount, coupon, or event happening over the holidays, make sure your customers know they can share it with their friends. How? Sharing buttons on your website, of course, and sharing incentives too. But also the tips in the next two installments of our series on holiday marketing.
- Preparing social media content for the holidays
- Creating holiday email campaigns
Stick around for Part 3 of our Holiday Marketing series and learn everything you need to prepare your social media content for the holidays, or get instant access to our complete Holiday Marketing Playbook free here!
