With the holiday season just around the corner, there’s never been a better time to start preparing your marketing strategy, and bringing as many leads and potential customers to your website as possible. One of the best ways to bring in free, organic leads and potential customers is through content marketing – blog posts, infographics and other content that ranks originally on Google and encourages people to click through to your website.
If you haven’t already planned your Christmas content, now is the time to do so. Below, we’ve rounded up some of the best ways to prepare your content for the Christmas rush.
1. Write – or update – your gift guides
Gift guides are a great way to introduce visitors to your products and services, while creating valuable and shareable content that will rank well on Google. Guides like “10 best Christmas gifts for X lovers” work well, and can quickly pick up backlinks from other bloggers and ecommerce website owners. Plus, if you partner with other ecommerce businesses in your niche (or, indeed, in other niches) you can recommend and link back to each other’s products, without having to pay for advertisements or spend time on blogger outreach.
2. Make your content part of the celebrations
Make your content part of the celebrations
Content marketing doesn’t have to be promotional – or, at least, not overly promotional. Make content marketing part of your Christmas celebrations and engage your audience on the run-up to the big day. You could post social media content on December 25 to get people to engage with your business and make your brand part of their celebrations.
You could also consider hosting daily competitions or post free downloads and resources on your blog as part of a ’12 Days of Christmas’ campaign, similar to Apple’s annual giveaway.
3. Focus on user-generated-content
One of the best ways to get your audience to engage with your brand and show customers why your brand is the best is to focus on user generated content. You could feature case studies and customer stories in your Christmas blog posts, share their social media posts (like Christmas Instagram posts) in your content, or even run a competition on your website and get customers to create content that you can use to market your business.
Just take the Starbucks #WhiteCupContest as an example. The coffee giant asked customers to design their own coffee cups and share their creations on social media, creating a viral contest that put Starbucks in the spotlight and created thousands of pieces of content that the brand could use as part of their marketing strategy. You could do something similar this Christmas, whether that’s asking customers to share pictures of them using your products over the season, or getting them to create Christmas poems and songs incorporating your brand and marketing messages.
4. Take yourself a little less seriously
Christmas is a time for letting your hair down and having fun – and your content marketing strategy should follow that same pattern. Not every post and social media update has to be promotional and serious – you can take a step back and have some fun on your marketing efforts. Create GIFs, videos, tutorials and posts that encourage your audience to interact with your brand. That could be by taking part in a challenge, singing or creating a Christmas giveaway – there’s no limit to how much fun you can have, all while promoting your brand.
5. Prepare for Christmas 2018
Time for the obvious: when it comes to marketing, big businesses have a huge advantage over smaller companies. So much so, that many start their Christmas marketing strategies more than a year in advance to boost their chances of ranking at number one on Google for competitive search terms. The good news? You can join ‘em!
If you know that Christmas, Halloween, Easter and Summer are particularly busy times for your business, then preparing your marketing efforts in advance will serve you well. You can create content, prepare your blog posts, update your product pages and change your meta descriptions and keywords in advance so that, when the time comes, you’ll be ranking and driving organic traffic. As soon as you wrap up your 2017 campaign, make plans for 2018.
Wrapping up
Christmas is a time for celebration and giving back, but it’s also a chance for you to take your business to the next level. Executing a successful content marketing strategy during the Christmas season can help bring thousands of visitors to your website and future-proof your business. Whether you’re new to blogging or you’ve been working on a strategy for some time, ramp up your efforts and let the results speak for themselves as December arrives.
About the Author
Max Greene is the Managing Director of Muffin Marketing, a marketing agency specialising in content marketing, social media marketing and search engine optimisation.