Archive for December, 2019

As consumers deck their halls with holiday decor, they also stock their fridges with more wine than in any other season.

And with family travel at an all-time high during the last few months of the year, hospitality marketers should connect with consumers who plan ahead.

In fact, the majority of national brands start planning their marketing campaigns for the holidays in September, if not earlier.

But for digital marketers, social media allows for more leniency thanks to the seemingly “real time,” and ongoing content creation. That doesn’t mean that marketing people should wait until the last minute to plan a holiday campaign (or – even worse – wait until the day of and share a blurry iPhone pic with no CTA).

With a little bit of prepping before we get into the thick of the holidays, North Bay marketers can promote their products or services early and keep the momentum going through the Time Square ball drop.

Here are five tips for getting your holiday digital marketing started:

1. In order to look forward, make sure to look back.

Look at digital marketing insights on social media and Google analytics from the past few years. Note any trends that appear during the holidays that may differ from the rest of the year. Check out which pages on your website tend to get more traffic during the holiday months (Oct – Dec). Write these trends down, and brainstorm ideas for promotions and holiday gift sets with your team.

Read more: Holidays are great time to build social media relationships

While social media continues to play a huge role in Americans’ lives in both a personal and professional sense, there’s also a growing wariness that marketers need to be aware of. For example, a 2018 Pew Research Center study found that social media overtook print newspapers as a more popular news source, yet a 2019 Pew study revealed that 62 percent of U.S. adults think social media companies have too much control over the news that users see.

Leading into 2020, social networks appear primed for both active engagement and active scrutiny, and social media companies may quickly change how they operate as a result. For example, Twitter recently announced they would stop allowing political advertising, and networks like Instagram are experimenting with hiding the number of likes on posts in an effort to reverse the negative mental health effects associated with social media comparisons, as CNET reports.

For marketers, even if these changes do not seem to apply directly to your brand, they underscore the point that social media marketers tend to operate on rented land. The major social media networks are publicly traded companies that exist to grow their own businesses, not yours. They are the ones in control of how their platforms work, and your efforts to be successful through their mediums, such as building up your followers to reach an organic audience, can essentially be made irrelevant overnight.

Read more: 5 Ways to Dominate Social Media Marketing in 2020