The Christmas period is always a tricky one for businesses when it comes to web marketing in Brisbane. Whether you’re selling a physical or digital product or service, it’s hard to know when to ramp things up or scale them back a bit, but the answer is rarely as black and white as that. Regardless of whether you shut down completely for the end of the year or continue trading and need to keep the sales and leads coming in, there are a lot of things to consider across all of your advertising channels, so we thought we’d offer a few simple tips on what those considerations are and how best to assess your situation and take action accordingly, split into businesses who need to keep trading and those who will scale it back until the new year.
Businesses who need to keep trading
Social Media accounts:
Obviously, the Christmas period can be a busier than usual period for anyone selling products and services online without a physical store to maintain and although staff would likely be a little downsized, the show tends to go on. For this reason, your sales activities will likely continue (if not ramp up), but your social media accounts would be reasonably expected by your customers to ease up a little. However, despite this, people spend a LOT more time on social media over the holidays so it’s important not to let things go completely. Businesses who do tend to scale things back and close for the holidays are no different in the amount of attention they need to pay to their accounts. For this reason, planning and scheduling your posts is very important. Your customers are far more likely to remember your brand when it’s attached to special occasions and how you celebrate them (think Coca-Cola helping to shape the modern day Santa Claus!) so it’s good to remember to wish everyone a happy holiday and humanise your business.
Contrary to the opinion of some, it’s still okay to celebrate Christmas in digital marketing so long as you’re inclusive and try to address customers of all types. So not just the obligatory Christmas post, but some great holiday content in general that everyone can relate to and a bit of acknowledgement of everybody. It’s just good business for the 21st century. If you’re engaged in web marketing in Brisbane then there’s a lot of opportunity for summer snaps and great Australian December traditions like BBQ’s, family gatherings and New Years Eve of course so you shouldn’t have too much trouble! If you need more info on how to engage in inclusive web marketing there are some great articles here and here. They’re a bit America-centric but the information is relevant.
So have a think about a few posts you could schedule through December and early January and get cracking!
Pay Per Click (Search Engines & Social Media):
As we’ve already said, the show must go on with your sales efforts during the holidays if you’re not planning to close down for any significant period. We probably don’t need to explain why so long as you understand that your digital sales efforts are just as (and in some cases more) important than what’s happening physically (which if you’re here, we’re guessing is the case), particularly if you’re low on staff.
Speaking of physical sales, this time of year is when you need to decide whether you want to mirror your end of year sales or come up with something specific to online activities to try to create two separate approaches to bringing in holiday revenue. There are good reasons to do either (or both if you’re playing with a larger budget), but it depends highly on your products and services. For reasons on why to line offline and online up you can find our previous blog on this here and for info on why digital specific campaigns can be great click here.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation):
Without sounding too crass about it, SEO can be a bit of a blunt instrument. Sure there’s a lot of traffic to be had and a well-implemented campaign is far from without targeting, but its slow(er) moving nature when compared to other channels means that a lot of businesses seem to think that they should just put it on the backburner throughout December while they’re low on staff and given that they can’t immediately rank for anything. This is a two-fold mistake. 1. On the one hand, any good SEO campaign should be thinking about Christmas months in advance so that rankings can happen before and around Christmas. 2. The end of the year is when you should be thinking about what you’d like to rank for in the new year so that you can hit the ground running. The reason that most businesses think that they should pull back their efforts towards the end of the year (its slow-moving pace) is actually the reason that you should never pull the reins in on your Search Engine Optimisation.
Businesses who stop trading over Christmas
Honestly, a lot of the above advice still applies to you if you’re in this category, so make sure you have read through it. But there are a few small things that apply only to you, so let’s get to it.
Social Media accounts:
This would operate much as we’ve already outlined, but with businesses who will have a skeleton staff or less, planning ahead and scheduling is much more important. Follow the guidelines we’ve already laid out for your posting (once per week or so in December is fine) and make sure it’s all set to go live! If you’re able it would also be worth having someone on hand just to check in on the posts for interaction just in case there’s the odd undesirable or urgent customer query. With the former type, you can also just look at your filtering for Facebook and ramp it up a bit. You can find a guide on this here.
Pay Per Click (Search Engines & Social Media):
If you’re running on a skeleton staff and can take a reduced amount of queries then it doesn’t make sense to turn your PPC Campaigns off completely when there’s an opportunity to continue bringing in some revenue over a usually quite period. However if you’re shutting down completely then you would obviously need to pause these campaigns off unless you’re running some sort of branding campaign (branding never sleeps!), have an automated system (for ordering and shipping etc), or you have a clear understanding with your customer base that you are closed and will respond to enquiries once you’re open again.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation):
Everything we’ve said above regarding SEO holds true, however when a business is literally closed for a few weeks then obviously you can’t continue with everything to do with SEO given that it requires a lot of consultation. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t set a few key things up to continue in the background. For starters, if you’re blogging weekly (which you absolutely should be) according to your content plan (which you should definitely have) then it’s a simple matter of getting a few blogs ahead before the break and scheduling those posts to go live onsite. You’ll still need someone to then throw those posts up on social media if possible, but otherwise you can just schedule the posts on social media to your blog feed talking about what that week’s blog is about. With the amount of time spent on social media over this Christmas, you may even see your readership and subscriptions go up!
Then of course there’s strategy and link prospecting which can happen without your input for a few weeks to ensure everything is still humming along nicely and you don’t lose momentum.
Well that’s it for another day! As usual, if you’d like more information or to look into your options for web marketing in Brisbane then please feel free to get in touch!
