Making a Holiday Content List and Checking it Twice

While the snow isn’t falling yet (at least not for most of the country) winter and the holiday season will soon be here. Time is running short, but you can still leverage some strategic holiday magic to drive Santa-sized sales.  It all starts by engaging your customers early and providing rich content to get them in the spirit of spending. So get your business ready before the first turkey hits the table, or you may very well miss the sleigh ride to sizeable holiday sales.

Clichés aside, there are huge opportunities to take advantage of for higher profits this holiday season. Here are five ways to do that, and how to do it fast: 

Define Holiday Objectives

Revisit your 2014 content strategy and identify key areas of opportunity based on YTD performance to bolster your established plan. Identify which milestones you’ve reached, which lie ahead, and which need realigning to account for unexpected roadblocks. An audit of your content plan will also provide insight into the content that has worked well throughout the year and which content can be tweaked for a bang-up fourth quarter.

Be a Content Regifter

Don’t reinvent the wheel. You probably already have a content catalog at your disposal, and a quick audit will show you what’s working. There is a great chance that much of your content is ripe for repurposing. This is extremely important, particularly as the holidays grow nearer and workloads intensify. Whether it’s byline articles or editorials, 3rd party video content, customer reviews, brand ambassador blogs, or how-to videos for top selling product categories, your existing content can be repurposed for your holiday programs with a bit of creativity. Turn category videos into written gift guides, or compile product videos into special holiday deal compilations on Black Friday landing pages – the possibilities are endless.

Put a Bow on it

Consumers respond strongly to rich visual content. Surprise shoppers with an unexpected element of fun by creating personalized and engaging experiences on your site. Sports Authority provides a great example of this at the bottom of their homepage here. This style of merchandising creates opportunity for cross and upsells and gives visitors an easy way to shop for everyone on their gift list – without ever leaving your site. With just a little help from your content partner or user experience team, almost any content can be reimagined with a holiday-themed skin. Just make sure that you aren’t distracting buyers from purchasing by overcomplicating the process (or by going overboard with the holiday flair).

Create a Long and Targeted Gift List

Ensure your efforts pay off by putting your message in front of the right audience as often as possible. In the video strategy world, we call this Return on Production.  This is a spin on traditional ROI (return on investment). Regardless of the nomenclature, if your content isn’t reaching the right people, then your efforts will not likely yield the results you’d wished for. Content targeting is hugely important and surprisingly simple, yet often overlooked.

In today’s multi-channel shopping world, consumers have more buying options than ever before. Mobile alone has changed when, where, and how we shop. Therefore, be strategic and distribute your content across all of your available channels. For instance, Lenovo uses video in their email campaigns to encourage opens and increase clicks, thereby offering dynamic interaction with their brand. Consumers are thirsty for this type of content. So, give them a little extra shopping inspiration this holiday season.

Leave Some Milk and Cookies for Mobile

How many times a day do you check social sites and read email on your smartphone or tablet? Probably quite a few.  And how often do you shop your favorite brands online or research goods and services from your phone?  You aren’t alone, and that is no big surprise.

Mobile will continue to play a significant and dominating role in online shopping this holiday season. According to IBM’s Seventh Annual Online Retail Holiday Readiness Report, mobile sales, from both smartphones and tablets, reached a high of 19.1% of all site sales this past December, up three-fold from December 2011. Mobile site traffic reached a record of 38.2% in March 2014, more than double that of March 2012.

Video content is particularly important and powerful. Our own analytics show that nearly 33% of all brand video views occur on mobile devices, and that video view rates are almost 25% higher on mobile phones and tablets. Time to make sure your content is optimized for mobile!

Now that you have identified your holiday goals, repurposed some content, wrapped it in a pretty package, and dedicated resources for mobile, it’s time to rally your teams and lock down your holiday marketing plans. Sleigh bells will soon be ringing, but if you follow these steps you will very likely receive the gift of increased sales this holiday season.

Lori Sternberg is Senior Program Manager at Invodo.