Holiday Online Marketing Checklist

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

With the holidays right around the corner if you have not begun making the necessary preparations to get your business message across you are a bit behind the eight ball. Don’t worry though because there is still some time to get going fairly quickly and start hustling to get things done. Four of the largest holidays are all crammed into the next few months and with those holidays come lots of holiday shoppers.

Forgetting a certain step when marketing a website for the holiday’s, which is often times the busiest time of year could cause revenues for the year to severely dip. Typically for the end of the year holidays most businesses start planning and preparing well into the beginning of the new year but if you are a late bloomer don’t you worry, there are still things you can do.

Here is a holiday online marketing checklist of things to review:

Landing Pages
You are probably going to want to use holiday themed landing pages for certain activities like advertising and pay per click. Landing pages are often times very important for marketing during special times of the year. Having the right landing pages for all your separate holidays and promotions could be the make or break for your campaigns. Just dropping off your visitors to the home page of your website or even an internal page might not make the impact on sales that you are looking for the holiday season.

Holiday Creatives
Don’t scramble around at the 11th hour with all your creative pieces like logos and images for the holidays to put on your website. Take care of that stuff now rather than later so you can take the time to pick the right images and creative pieces for all your online and offline material. The right image or graphic design could make or break your whole approach to spreading your holiday business message.

Pay Per Click Ads
For many businesses out there pay per click advertising is going to be an immensely important area to be visible in. That means lots of keyword research and ad writing. Depending on what you are selling you are going to want to write a whole new group of ads for certain products so they reflect the impulses of the person looking to make a purchase during the holiday season. Pay per click advertising can be a very time consuming set up process during the holidays so you want to make sure you get a nice head start prior to the holiday season beginning.

Inventory
The last thing you want to happen on your website is to run out of inventory during the peak of the season. If a website visitor arrives at your site to make a purchase and you are out of product they will go find it somewhere else almost immediately. Don’t push your web traffic to your competitors.

Prepare Holiday Online Coupons
Don’t be a scrooge! People want discounts and they will go to extraordinary lengths in order to find those discounts. All it takes is for your competitor to have a 10% off coupon floating around and your website visitor will gravitate in that direction. The way things are in our economy now brand loyalty to e-commerce shopping is out the window. If someone can save a few bucks on their purchase they most certainly will do it. Put together a nice list of coupons along with a way to get them out into the community well before so they are floating around for people to find.

Get Your Social Media Buzzing
You should already be doing this but get your social media communities really ramped up and buzzing so when it comes time to promoting your coupon codes and also your new holiday products it happens a bit smoother. Your social community is a very important area to be in constant communication with because they are your ambassadors to your business. You do them right and they will spread the message for you even further. Word of mouth and referral is a very powerful form of marketing and your social community is just the community to do it.

If you haven’t already prepared don’t stress about it. Get started now so you can get the ball rolling and it will allow you to be that much more prepared for the future. The holidays are an amazing time for businesses to pull in extra revenue dollars and it is important to show up to the game with lots of ammo.