Holiday Marketing Tips

The holiday season is upon us, the kids in town just decorated the big pine tree that sits in the middle of the small town I live in, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, just ahead of Thanksgiving. They have holiday spirit! Do you?

I was speaking with a client of ours who we manage ads and content for, they run a local courier delivery service. We sat down to talk and he was very focused, Alex, Christmas is around the corner and I want to be ready. I certainly get it! The holidays wait for no business and it breeds an ever frenzied sense of instant gratification.

He wanted to know, what can we do to better position ourselves for the surge of the holidays. According to the National Retail Federation, consumer spending is estimated to go up by roughly three-and-a-half percent this year. Obviously, more and more of the shopping will happen online with retailers such as Amazon leading the way. So how do we help the local business owner rev up their presence during the holiday season?

What do people fear?

What people fear most during the holiday season? That’s a good guess and I’m not sure. I know that if I’m at an electronics store on Black Friday I’m just terrified of being trampled to death as the doors swing open. However, a common thing that people worry about these days are holiday shipping delays. Holiday shipping delays make the gift of giving around the holiday a little aweso. With my client, we discussed the common questions he receives during the holidays. “Will my package reach its destination on time? Is it guaranteed?

With that in mind, I had a few ideas on what we could do to put together a basic strategy for the holiday season. A courier service’s success is tied to reliability and speed. Can his courier service take away that anxiety of failing to get that last minute gift delivered on time? How can he communicate that to potential and existing customers?

What do people need?

Once I understood what his customers feared I then felt it was appropriate to understand what they needed. Again, they need to simply get gifts from one part of the town to another, reliably on time and it needed to be guaranteed. Fortunately, his courier service guarantees their deliveries with the “OR ELSE GUARANTEE.” It sounds really imposing, honestly. Your packages will get where their going and on time OR ELSE!

Creating a strategy around fear and need

With an understanding of people fears and needs during the holidays, when it comes to gift giving, it was clear what we ought to do.

We would create a simple content strategy and support it with an ad campaign.

The content strategy would comprise one post that discussed why holiday shipping delays occur. Then we will create a series of articles about how to ensure a consumer’s gift reaches its intended recipient on time. We will then promote these posts on the client’s chosen social networks with Facebook being one of them. The ads will be built as a mix of text based ads and call based ads.

Doing the research

How does one know where to begin with a content or ad campaign in the first place? It’s something I’ve written about before and in this case, I think starting quickly with some competitor research was the way to start. We began scouring Google (using incognito mode of course) and brainstormed relevant search terms. We came up with a few keywords and phrases such as: holiday shipping, holiday delivery, holiday courier, holiday shipping delays and so on.

We would get a number of sites in the search results and we went into each site noting keyword usage on page and also under the hood in meta titles and meta descriptions.

We assembled a good list of twenty keywords to help get us going. We then took the keywords to Google Trends to see how popular these phrases were in search. Most of the keywords we input showed a surge of interest during the holiday seasons not surprisingly. It let us know what some of the better keywords to use were.

Putting it together

When it comes to the holidays, sooner is better, so when my client came by we had to get to work right away as time wasn’t our ally. The content will be useful information for consumers and will, I believe, positively impact my client’s SEO for a few relevant keywords in the holiday shipping space. I believe that promoting these posts on Facebook will help drum up local business or spread word of mouth through his many FB contacts. That’s the idea there. The ads will definitely help with targeting ready-to-buy shoppers. I’m curious to see how the client’s call-ads do. We’ll be working the campaign out up through the week of Christmas. I may do a follow up to see how we do there.

That said, if you live in Southern California and you need a tip-top courier delivery service, then you need to talk to Chris at Speed Link Courier Services.