Holidays represent a huge opportunity for brands and retailers to showcase the more human characteristics of their business and connect with their customers on a personal level. With Memorial Day in the rearview mirror, retailers are focusing on standing tall with their Father’s Day campaigns. But that’s easier said than done.
We’re living in an age of ad blockers and buying consumers’ attention is becoming less and less viable. As Father’s Day gifts become more and more niche, this means businesses must focus on providing value that organically draws their audience to them. This is a chance for marketers to create meaningful experiences and help people while also helping their businesses succeed and grow.
Brands like Gillette and Foot Locker made pushes to humanize marketing in 2017, as marketers start to realize that tapping into the emotion of customer-centric, useful content produces better results.
So, let’s find out what retailers need to be doing to make the most of their Father’s Day marketing campaigns.
Start Early
Getting a head start on the holiday’s may seem like a no-brainer, but there’s a reason why I’m putting it first. Holidays tend to sneak up on us, so from an organic search standpoint it makes sense to start seeding pages related to them into the index and then allow them to remain up all year long and just remove them from your navigation. The earlier the better.
Not only can a head start on a campaign give the customer new inspiration to make purchases during the activation, but it helps on the backend as well. Having the ability to test your strategies allows you to gain new insights and innovate on ideas to have a successful holiday campaign.
Use The Same Page Every Year
Gaining those insights on the performance of your campaign can help you make tweaks to perfect it year after year, but you shouldn’t have to recreate the wheel.
Don’t create a new landing page every year for the holiday or deactivate the page. Pages that are left up have the ability to collect valuable links and increase in rankings over time, so even if the page doesn’t exist in your navigation, it should remain live all year.
As mentioned above, you’ll have to refresh the messaging and design every year, but you would be doing that anyway in creating a new page and the page won’t lose any positioning because it was never deindexed. This just takes the hassle out of having to launch it or activate it year after year and starting from scratch. Just remove it from the navigation and add it back in when you want to being featuring the page again.
Get Creative With Your Keyword Selection & Content
Regardless of what your product set is, “Father’s Day Gifts” can be a tough nut to crack. You’ll want to get creative with how you target your audience.
Try to match your products and message back to your customers intent instead of just trying to rank for a broad keyword set. Ask yourself these important questions: What makes your brand’s products special? Why should people buy from you and not others? What problem does this problem solve?
The more creative you’ll get the better your conversions and performance will be.
Try to Have Some Form Of Evergreen Content On Your Landing Page
With an evergreen page, comes evergreen content. You should try to have some universal base that the keywords you have selected live in throughout the year.
While you can certainly update it when you refresh the page, consider what needs to be there all year to maintain the rankings you want and not just what needs to be there in June.
One Page to Rule Them All
You shouldn’t have separate landing pages for different channels. If you want to build the equity of a page around a holiday, it’s best to have one page that serves all audiences so that you can build its equity and visibility.
Some people may disagree with me here, but Father’s Day has a very limited keyword set. The more you can do to build one page up and focus efforts there, the better off you’ll be in the long run.
Digital marketing continues to open new doors for brands to capture new and existing customers. Creating content is no longer about just planting a seed to help solve a customer’s problem. As consumers get younger, more long-form content is being used as more of a transactional vehicle than it’s ever been before.
If companies go about their Father’s Day plans as business as usual, they may miss out on key revenue and customer retention opportunities. The brands and retailers that take these five steps to heart, will likely be the ones that win hearts and minds, and most importantly, shoppers, come Father’s Day.
Patrick Reinhart is Senior Director of Digital Strategies for Conductor, Inc.