Here are five principles your business can apply to its holiday marketing efforts to ensure holly jolly success.

With Christmas just around the corner, businesses are busy scrambling to push out resonant marketing messages, ad campaigns, and prepping a variety of materials to help consumers get into the holiday shopping spirit.

To make the most out of the holidays, brands need only adhere to a set of proven guidelines to help lure shoppers into their stores, digital or otherwise.

There is always room for new contenders to earn a sizable market share; even if you’re the new kid on the block, you can trust there’s enough to go around. This year, the National Retail Federation anticipates December sales will rake in some $680 billion in revenues.

It’s important that you understand how to get a piece of the holiday action by creating awareness, driving traffic, and amassing sales. If your brand is on the ball, it can flourish in these abundant times.

Here are five principles your business can apply to its holiday marketing efforts to ensure holly jolly success.

1. Video ads crush it on social media

Video is a powerful and red-hot ad tactic for attracting customer attention and driving sales. Simply adding a video to a landing page can increase conversions by 80%. Moreover, 83% of businesses state that video provides a satisfying return on investment.

Facebook is the ideal social media platform to push your video message. Considering the site’s enormous audience size, targeting options, and its feverish need to serve up video posts, Facebook’s ad platform is also intuitive enough that beginners can get started with it easily.

For example, a recent case study published by Facebook highlights how General Motors was able to increase sales of OnStar data plans by 2.3% through video adverts.

Promo is a powerful marketing tool that helps marketers create high-quality videos from millions of professionally shot HD stock clips. Just pick the footage that fits your messaging best, add some provided royalty-free music, enter your text, upload your logo, and you’ve got a video ad ready to go. The UI is intuitive even for first-time creators.

Promo also showcases collections of pre-designed and customizable holiday video ads, which are extremely effective at drumming up seasonal sales and traffic.

2. Festive websites sell more products

Considering the time of year, people have expectations that nearly all communications match the holiday spirit on some level. For this reason, it’s important that your business reflects the season via your website.

As soon as a visitor lands on any main page, they should be met with holiday cheer: Holiday banner images, falling snowflakes, seasonal content – all of these elements inspire more purchases.

It’s also wise to A/B test variations of these elements to see if certain vibes and specific visuals resonate more with specific subsets of shoppers. You can easily do this with intuitive tools like Optimizely. This is a stellar tool for testing and measuring just about any website element.

In addition to giving your front-end a facelift, consider bulking up your back-end capabilities.

Since it’s likely your site will experience higher volumes of traffic during the holiday season, it’s important to look at your hosting provider package to ensure stability. You should also contemplate similar upgrades with your security features and payment processor to prepare for the uptick in transactions.

The investment will be well worth the smooth and secure customer experience, especially since this is a prime method to ensure loyalty and longevity.

3. Your most loyal customers deserve a thank you

Speaking of loyalty, we all know repeat customers are the lifeblood of any business. Finding creative and poignant ways to acknowledge your best customers incentivizes them to continue patronizing your store, as well as sharing the experience with others in their network.

Sending out messages of appreciation can help endear you to your customers, but it can also help you break through the clutter in their inboxes. One recent study from Adestra found that “Thank You” is the top-performing email subject line.

During the holiday season, give a little back to your core community by sending out special discounts, coupons, or offers that new shoppers don’t have access to; be sure to personalize these messages and show your sincere gratitude for their continued support.

This not only shows these folks that their business matters to you, but it will also help to deepen the bond between them and your brand.

4. Deep Discounts Can Help Tip the Scales

It’s important to know that very few people are going to trek out into the cold for a paltry 10% off.

During this time of year, consumers are ready to spend, but merchants need to motivate them with deep discounts or special sales. Keep in mind you are also competing with hundreds of other offers vying for your customers’ attention too.

When formulating a sale concept, consider what would be special about what you are offering to consumers. Why would they shop at your store above all others?

Some ideas for a sale might include holiday combos of pre-assembled product bundles, free shipping for online orders over a certain dollar figure, or free gift wrapping.

Another popular idea is to partner with a social cause or charity and donate a portion of sales or something similar for each purchase made. People give more around the holidays than any other time of year, so use that to your advantage and create a win-win.

5. Keep the Focus on Specific Products

One area that a myriad of retailers end-up falling short with each year is the products they choose to promote. Many businesses opt to publish homepage designs, or send out emails showcasing huge arrays of goods. While this may seem intuitive, it can also easily lead to selection paralysis, better known as the paradox of choice.

This principle states that when consumers are presented with too many options, they tend to make no selection at all.

Following this logic, it is wise for brands to highlight just a few specific products in your messaging touchpoints. Not only does this eliminate the threat of the overwhelm, it can also create a sense of urgency through scarcity.

When consumers feel as if a product is limited (in this case by the number of other shoppers who will want to cash in on the deal) they are more likely to act on it.

Wrapping it up

The holidays offer golden opportunities for brands to up their marketing game and achieve substantial boosts in revenue. Speak the language of the holiday season to your core customers, and you will reap the benefits. Ignore the opportunity to showcase seasonal offers, however, and you will likely be left in the cold.

Article written by: Ryan Kh