5 ways to optimize your web strategy for the Holidays

For e-commerce, the holidays are the busiest time of the year. Traffic to websites starts to increase in October, as consumers go into the research phase of gift buying. By November, conversions are going into high gear as the buying phase takes hold. That makes it essential for companies be ready to take advantage of the increase in shopping traffic and ensure they get the most traffic they can to their websites. Here are 5 ways you can get ahead of the competition during the holiday shopping season.

1. Define your personas

Personas are groups of individuals with the same attitudes as your typical customer. By adapting your communications to their needs, you will get better performance from your web campaigns as you will appear more relevant to their needs. Knowing your personas well should allow you to produce targeted campaigns by carefully analyzing your prospects habits.

2. Adopt retargeting

Google Ads and Facebook offer features allowing you to target visitors to your website but who have not acted upon making a purchase. This can include non-active clients, abandoned purchase baskets and pre-reservations. With this information you can retarget them on other communication channels.

You can even test different advertising models or promotion types to know what motivates them to order from you. You could also create Google Ads with keywords related to Christmas, or even Facebook special holiday edition ads.

3. Put emotion in your messages

Think of the Christmas spirit and reflect its magic by focusing your messages on family, pleasure, gifts, meals, and the joy of the holidays. It is important to convince your potential customers to want your products or services. With blog posts, you can describe in detail how your products and services correspond to their needs.

4. Optimize for mobile surfing

Now a days, we cannot ignore the importance of being responsive to mobile web browsing. That means being mobile-friendly in email campaigns, advertising, and landing pages, all designed specifically for smartphones and tablets. Consider as well developing a mobile app for special needs that can be fulfilled in a very efficient way.

5. Don’t forget social networks

Moderate your Facebook community, invest in Facebook Ads, build a Facebook app (Quizz, game, contest, etc.). Do advertising on other social networks by sponsoring your content i.e. your tweets, blog posts, etc. Since nothing is better than client testimonials, let your clients share their experience with your brand by making comments and sharing opinions on your pages.

Remember that most Internet users shop early, they do their Christmas purchases between Black Friday at the end of November and Cyber Monday on December 15. Also, consumers use a variety of devices (smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc.) in their search and buying process. Finally, most Internet users do not have a specific brand in mind at the time of their searches, so consider a special holiday marketing strategy to increase your visibility online.