How Can You Turbocharge Your Holiday Marketing? Understand Consumer Behavior

Posted by Craig Maloney | October 30, 2017 | Filed under: Marketing

Digital marketing has a lot of moving pieces, including technical dimensions, creative components, budgetary concerns, and more. Ultimately, however, any marketing endeavor boils down to human beings. To properly position your brand and lead the buyer toward conversion, you first have to understand how people behave; how they make decisions; and how they ultimately choose which products to buy and which to ignore.

This is especially significant during the holiday shopping season. With most everybody in a “buying” state of mind, the marketer’s job is to understand how to leverage human behavior to propel your brand above the competition. To that end, we have three basic principles for marketers to consider at the outset of this holiday shopping season.

In 2016, the holiday shopping season drove a 30 percent uptick in the number of retail search terms—specifically, those in the 90th percentile (or higher) in terms of search frequency.

It goes without saying that, during the holiday season, most consumers search more—but they also search for a broader array of terms. Indeed, the field of popular search terms expands significantly between Halloween and Christmas.

So what does this mean for your brand? Again, think in terms of human behavior, and respond in kind. To be discovered during this busy search season—let alone purchased—your brand needs to be optimized for a wide range of holiday-specific search terms. This may require optimized content across a variety of search and e-commerce platforms (Google and Amazon, for instance).

Does your product qualify as a great gift for kids? Add that to your list of keywords. Does your product fit into the “stocking stuffer” category? Make sure your marketing language reflects that.

Updates to product detail pages are pushed much harder during holiday months as opposed to non-holiday months.

Something else for marketers to be aware of is that, by and large, brands are more proactive in their digital efforts during the holiday season. Some statistics show holiday season product content updates exceeding non-holiday ones by 75 percent or more!

Of course, there is a reason for this: Data proves over and over again that product content updates have a meaningful and measurable impact on sales. The ROI is real.

The takeaway for marketers is that consumer shopping habits change over the holidays, and pushing out more information and more updates is a good way to be responsive to these changes. You can also consider how you might respond to consumer shifts throughout the year—perhaps making product content updates a regular rhythm within your marketing calendar.

The shopping season really begins at the first of November; that’s when consumers start looking, and it’s when brands need to have holiday-specific language incorporated into their marketing materials.

The bottom line: If you’re doing product content updates around Thanksgiving, you’re probably too late. The time to start doing them is Halloween and the days immediately thereafter—because that’s when the shopping season really ramps up.

Most brands are aware of this. Again, look at the data: Study after study shows that the use of holiday-specific search terms (“stocking stuffer,” “new year,” etc.) skyrockets in November—not in December.

Not everyone does their holiday shopping at the last minute! You’ve got to push your holiday content earlier in the season in order to engage those shoppers who begin working through their Christmas lists early.

Are You Ready for the Holiday Season?

The overall message for marketers is that your digital efforts don’t merely need to conform to Google’s algorithms; they need to match up with human behavior, too. That’s crucial for all brands, but especially so for retailers. And given how much human behavior changes around the holidays, the need for some strategic change-ups is imminent.

How will you modify your marketing efforts to better appeal to consumers and holiday shoppers? That’s something EverythingOnline can assist you with. We always take a data-backed approach, and can help you implement the strategies you need to make your brand or product truly competitive in the cutthroat holiday shopping season.

Position your brand for end-of-the-year success. For effective online marketing orange county, reach out to the EverythingOnline today.