Get a head start – Preparing your business for the holiday season

It’s that time of year again when we’re all frantically preparing for the holidays and undoubtedly feel behind. With customers beginning to purchase earlier and more frequently, it’s critical to make sure your website is up to date. We’ll look at some brief strategies in this blog article to ensure that your Christmas shopping clients have a great buying experience. Here are some ideas for getting your site ready in time for the holidays.

Update your blog with seasonal articles and topics related to the holidays

This is a great time to speak right to the needs of your customers by coming up with some fun and relevant holiday blog posts. You’ll want to brainstorm ideas on how your products or services could help them during this time. What can you do to make the shopping process easier for them? What would excite or entertain them?

There are lots of ways to incorporate the holidays into your blog posts and it will vary from niche to niche. You could write about topics like how to create a fun family tradition around your product, gift ideas for hard-to-shop-for people on your list, comparing different products and services surrounding the holidays so that your readers can find what they need.

Get creative! The more blog posts you have, the more search engine exposure your site will get. Also, be sure to promote your blog posts on other platforms or send out emails that link to the full blog post to get even more out of your holiday blog posts.

Create an email newsletter that includes discounts, specials, and promotions

Email marketing is one of the best ways for your business to reach out to customers. It can secure you more sales and create a stronger bond between your brand and its audience.

Plan ahead

In an ideal world, we would all have a marketing strategy planned ahead of time year-round. But I know that life gets crazy and often the email list is the first to slip. When it comes to the holiday season, there is never a time too early to get started so plan, plan, plan as much as you can in advance. Even if you don’t have a list, now is the time to start building an email list.

If you plan strategically, you’ll be able to know when you will have certain sales or new products to push, and how often you will want to be reminding your audience about these via email. Having a strategy in place will help you feel much more prepared for the holidays, and it will guarantee that no sales are missed.

Offer special sales

Offering incentives is one of the most effective methods to get someone into your business or to consider your services during this busy moment. Creating special offers and discounts (for a limited time only!) that are only accessible through your email list is a great way to get more sales.
You’ll also want to consider having special discounts for Black Friday. It’s the biggest shopping day of the year, and you don’t want to miss out on a chance to increase your sales. Promoting discounts for this big shopping holiday will be a great way to get your list primed and ready to make some purchases.

Send valuable content and reminders

Consider what your consumers might find useful during this time and offer it to them. Sure, subscribers want special offers, but there’s more you can give them. Use your emails to send important information like the last day for delivery before Christmas, when Black Friday deals end, or when your inventory of popular items becomes limited. You can also send gift suggestions for hard to shop for people and don’t be afraid to send reminder emails for abandoned carts. Staying top of mind is one of the most important things to consider during this season.

Share your content on social media channels like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Tiktok

There are a wide variety of marketing channels you can use throughout the holiday season, so think about where your target audience is most active and engage with them there. Consider using these channels to share new products or blog content that have been created since last year’s holidays, discounts you’re offering through social media, and any other helpful information people will find useful during this time.

If you’re not sure what content to create for the holiday season, consider asking some questions in order to guide your decisions: What do my current customers need as they prepare for the holidays? What content has resonated well with my audience throughout the last year? How can I help simplify someone’s shopping experience during this busy time of year?

Once you’ve answered these questions, start planning out your content. You can plan a series of Facebook posts, Pinterest pins and Instagram stories/posts that share helpful information with your followers. Another huge sales opportunity comes from keeping your eyes peeled for opportunities to participate in events surrounding the holidays – whether it be an in-person market, a group giveaway, or hiring influencers to help promote your business.

There are endless ways to market your business on social media but the most important thing to keep in mind is to do your best to center your content around your customers’ needs rather than promoting a product or service. This will help your leads create a genuine connection with you and trust you enough to purchase from you.

Improve your SEO (search engine optimization)

Enhancing your SEO will help your website be more visible in search results so you can increase traffic to your site. You’ll want to make sure that any holiday-related content is optimized for search engines. Do your research and then optimize all of your pages with relevant keywords and phrases that will be searched by potential customers looking for gifts or other items this time of year!

By optimizing each page on your site with relevant content, improving your links to increase their power, updating your analytics tracking code so you can track how customers are finding your website and doing link building techniques like guest blog posting you should be able to see an increase in visitors to your website.

I know SEO can be a daunting skill to learn but it’s something to keep in mind and work towards year-round. No one’s SEO is perfect but the more you work towards improving it, the more results you will see.

Optimize your website for desktop and mobile

It is crucial to make sure that your website loads quickly on a mobile device as well as a desktop computer during the holidays and year-round. Ideally, your website should load within 3 seconds on all traffic. This is very important because 70% of online shoppers will abandon a page if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds and 40% will leave your site completely if it takes longer than 3-5 seconds to load. The last thing you want is for your holiday visitors to leave your site because it takes too long to load. You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to get more information on how fast your website loads and suggestions on making improvements.

Also, be sure to double or even triple-check that all of the important purchasing functions work properly. People who are shopping online are often willing to buy right away if they see something that interests them. If your website is the one that delivers a fast online shopping experience, it can lead to more sales. That’s one of the reasons Amazon has been so successful. The better your website performs and the fewer steps your consumer has to go through to make a purchase from you, the more often you will successfully convert viewers into customers.

Happy selling!

Preparing your website for the holiday season to increase visitors and sales is a lot of work. But the more effort you put into preparing for this season now will lead to better results come December. By utilizing your email list, creating a social media marketing plan, improving your SEO, and optimizing your website for both mobile and desktop, you can expect a major boost in online traffic and sales this holiday season!

If all these tasks seem overwhelming and you need help with them, I’m happy to partner with you! I’d love to help make sure that you have all the tools necessary to take advantage of every opportunity during this time period. Do not hesitate to contact me via my contact form or in the DMs on Instagram. I can’t wait to connect!

How Can We Help?

Ready to rebrand? We can help you every step of the way.