If business booms for you during the holidays, it’s already the most wonderful time of the year.
There you are, lounging by the pool or the beach, enjoying a refreshing beverage under the sun. Falling leaves, chilly weather, and holiday shopping feel a million blissful miles away. But if your business traditionally relies on holiday promotions, the end of summer is the unofficial start of the holiday season.
If you want to digitally boost your business three months from now, the time to get started with your online efforts is today!
This two-part blog series will help you get your holiday marketing efforts going with four key components to work on:
- Holiday SEO
- Promotional landing pages
- Email campaigns
- Social media
In this post, we’ll take a look at holiday SEO and landing pages.
Start Your Holiday SEO Now
Search engine optimization is a long game. In other words, the efforts you put in today take several months to catch, and full results of organic SEO can’t really be considered until the year mark! That’s why the time for holiday SEO is now, a few months before the shopping season begins.
Related: What is SEO Exactly?
To get on track with your holiday SEO, start with these three points:
Analyze your current traffic
A simple report from your Google Analytics can show you how people find you and where they’re clicking on your site. Then, use your Google Ads account to do some research into high-performing keywords for your industry.
If you notice traffic to your site from certain places (such as social media or a backlink from another site), that will give you clues as to what to target with your SEO efforts. If you discover certain keywords that become popular during the holiday months, you can build a landing page around exactly what you know people are looking for (keep reading for more on landing pages).
Update product titles and descriptions
With data in hand, focus on updating product titles and descriptions to incorporate top keywords. Our Etsy SEO guide has additional tips for how to do this effectively. Caution: Avoid the temptation to over-optimize. Keyword-stuffed text sounds unnatural, can be difficult to read, and, depending on the context, can actually be detrimental to your search rankings.
Make sure you’re mobile ready
Deloitte’s annual holiday retail report showed that 40% of shoppers used mobile for some stage of their shopping in 2017. With tech-savvy Millennials now being the largest living adult population and Gen Z right behind them, your site needs to meet your customers where they are — on their mobile devices. For SEO, this means making sure your site is fast and mobile-responsive.
Tips for a Great Holiday Promo Landing Page
A landing page is like a mini-website, usually dedicated to a single one of your products or services. It should be lightweight, hyper-focused, and able to stand on its own as a sales piece.
Why would you want to create a separate landing page instead of just sending people to a product page or your website’s homepage? Because its sole purpose for existence is to convert that visitor into a customer. The structure and copy will be specifically designed to lead your customer down the sales funnel in a short amount of time and space.
You’ll start by identifying the top product you want to promote, whether that’s a special service package or a product you’re planning to produce in large quantities. Once that’s decided, you’ll write the copy and design the layout.
Keep these elements in mind when putting together your landing page:
Take time to write compelling copy
Design is critical, but copy is what sells.
A landing page is a one-page, single shot to solve a specific problem and offer your ready-to-purchase solution. Your copy should be solely focused on your customer – this is not the place to wax poetic about your company values and history.
Start by answering these three questions:
- Who is your target customer?
- What are the three main pain points, conflicts, or problems they are dealing with?
- What are their three main objections to purchasing your product or service?
From there, it’s easy to write your text specifically around those pain points. Show how your product or service solves their problem. You can even use their objections to write subheads and sections!
Be intentional with your call to action
The good ol’ “Submit” button works, but there are many other options that can speak to your customer in a more interesting, personable way. Some ideas:
- Book it!
- Schedule now
- Customize it
- Order mine
- Choose this plan
- Send this gift
Yes, a CTA’s role is to be clear, not necessarily clever. That doesn’t mean you can’t personalize it. With just a few words, you can connect to your customer in a more meaningful way, helping cultivate trust and loyalty (read: repeat business).
Related: 7 Ways to Boost Online Marketing for Your Business During the Holidays
Create a “greasy” capture form
As a stand-alone sales piece, your landing page will need a form that aligns with your conversion goal. The form needs to have the fewest amount of steps necessary to encourage sales. Not surprisingly, forms that request less information and require fewer steps have higher conversion rates.
If you’re accepting payments on the landing page, only ask for the minimum amount of information needed to deliver the product and process the payment. If you’re simply gathering contact information, only ask for the details you absolutely need to follow up.
Need More Help With Holiday Marketing?
The holidays are already a hectic time of year, but you know how important it is to maximize those busy months. If you need help building an effective holiday marketing strategy, reach out to our team to get you on track!
Stay tuned for next month’s post, where we’ll cover holiday email and social media campaigns.
