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10 great Christmas inbound marketing ideas you need to check out

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The period over Christmas and into the new year is when many businesses wind down. However, it’s also an important time to keep your marketing dialled up, catch new customers and generate new leads when people have more free time to spend at home browsing the internet, than when they are at work.

Having a good festive plan in place means that you can be prepared and get everything lined up in advance, ensuring that your customer service and social media teams are prepped and ready for your marketing ideas.

Here are our top 10 inbound marketing ideas that you can implement now to make the most of the festive season.

Update your branding

Consider adding a little Christmas cheer to your company branding – it works for Starbucks who launches a festive cup alongside a specific festive drinks menu each year, encouraging new customers and repeat customers alike. The cups have become something of a seasonal staple and make their way onto many Instagram threads as a result. Your product or service might not be suitable for this kind of overhaul, but you could explore adding a little twist to your logo, just to catch the eye of potential customers on social media and make them look twice. It doesn’t need to be complicated or cheesy. You could add a simple border to your social media images or update the colour theme temporarily on your website – and when it’s done once, you can revisit it every year.

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Create Christmassy content

Make sure you tailor your content to hit the festive season. On your content plan, this should include useful and relevant information for the holidays. Be as creative as possible within your line of business, without being overly promotional. For example, if you work in the drinks industry, you could share recipes of your favourite festive and new year tipples that people can make themselves at home, with links to buy the relevant products – it’s informative, shareable and can create new leads to your business. If you work in travel, you could collate festive and new year experiences from around the world. It’s quite easy at this time of year to find fun, light and readable topics that will generate new leads and create a buzz on social media.

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Be a festive film star

Videos are a good plan at any time of year, but a Christmas video is a must. It gives you a chance to connect with your current and potential customer base on a more personal level, as well as give them something that adds value. Things that go down well at this time of year are ‘how-to’ instructional videos to achieve a Christmas craft, for example. The videos can also be self-promotional, such as how to use your product or service, which may encourage those looking for a gift or buying in the sales if they like what they see. Or it could just be a fun, thank you video featuring you and your team, to your customers and wishing them a Merry Christmas, which is a nice way of retaining loyalty, while showing the people behind the logo.

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Try a themed mailout

Break out of your usual email structure and timetable by sending out specific Christmas-targeted email campaigns. This is a good way of reminding previous customers and loyal fans that now is the time to buy. It’s nice to weave in a festive theme and focus on key products or services, preferably with a time-limited offer that encourages people to make quick decisions and buy before a deadline. If you can, offer your email list something special, such as free delivery, a bonus gift, early access to sale items… you want your loyal customers to feel valued and likely to continue shopping or working with you in the new year. You can encourage receivers to Forward to a Friend, so that they also benefit from the discounts or offers, which can lead to new business.

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Use Christmas as an excuse to re-engage

Over the course of a year, you may have a large number of lapsed customers, who could have forgotten about you, yet would be happy to buy from you again. Christmas is a good time to reach out and reengage with past customers. If you have a database of customer addresses, send out a Christmas card to say thank you for their past custom – it’s a nice, welcoming gesture and could remind customers about your services and products, particularly if your thank you includes a special discount. You can be eco-friendlier with digital Christmas cards to your email database instead. If you can personalise your greeting, then this shows even more forethought, but this does depend on the size of your business and how viable it is.

Send a digital catalogue

Christmas is made for catalogues, so think about how you are going to present your products and services. A digital PDF catalogue is something that can be designed bespoke for you, with your top-selling products and a professional finish. This can be embedded into your blog using services that enable customers to view and flick through the pages on-screen. This catalogue can then be promoted via social media or sent out to your email database. It’s cheaper than printing a physical catalogue and more instantly accessible, plus you can add interactive links directly to the products to make the process of buying as streamlined as possible.

Get creative in your community

Not everything you do over Christmas has to be based online; you can use the festive season to get out into your local community and engage with people. You could offer to help at a local charity, donate gifts to those in need, run an office-based fundraiser, host a Christmas lunch with nibbles and mulled wine… These are the sorts of gestures that local press may pick up on, for a heart-warming approach to covering businesses. It will help to raise your profile in the immediate locality, important if you are a physical shop or venue, for example. It also gives you content for your blog, revealing the more human side to your business, which is very appealing to customers who don’t want to feel they are dealing with a faceless corporation. It is a time of goodwill, so you could offer to give proceeds of some products or services to a worthwhile charity.

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Target the right people

Just because it’s Christmas doesn’t mean that you can neglect your strategy. Knowing your customer base is just as important as ever. If you haven’t already got a customer persona template, then download our free PDF now. This document helps you to think about who your best customer is and how to reach them effectively. This helps you to target all your marketing at the right people. At Christmas, this is more important than ever as multiple businesses are vying for attention and you need to engage with the right people to get sales. Use all the statistics and data at your disposal, such as Facebook Insights or Google Analytics to find out about your core customer base, and you can target your marketing strategies to appeal to these people.

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Stay current

up-to-date with the latest news, as this can help you to be present on social media at the right time. Use services like Google Trends to see what is popular and trending at any given time and think about how you can tailor your social media posts to fit this. For example, in the freezing weather and snow, you could post about how convenient it is to order products online and have them delivered, to save having to leave the comfort and warmth of home to get shopping done or browse the sales.

Run a competition

Christmas is a great time of year to run a competition. You want to go for something with a festive theme to generate lots of social media activity, so a picture-based competition is always a good option. Encourage creativity so that people engage with the competition and not see it as a self-promotional drive. Create a relevant hashtag to accompany your competition and promote it across all your channels to keep the momentum high. Make sure you offer a good prize as well, as they will help to encourage more entrants. You could also run a series of competitions leading up to Christmas, where there is something new to win everyday, or you could consider doing a 12 Days of Christmas theme starting from Christmas Day to help drive traffic to your website and hopefully generate sales in the period between Christmas and new year, which can be a little quiet.

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