What should be avoided when creating a marketing campaign?
Avoid these holiday marketing blunders to stay ahead of the competition during this year's critical retail sales period.
Online shopping accounts for a growing portion of retail sales, accounting for 18 percent globally, and this figure is expected to rise.
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| marketing mistakes in 2021 |
5 Marketing Campaigns Mistakes in Holiday
Whether you're selling online or using digital marketing to drive in-store sales, avoid these 5 holiday marketing blunders that can cost you online visibility, customers, and revenue.
1. Using Your Regular Website Rather Than Landing Pages
Make good use of targeted landing pages to attract customers with holiday-specific offers.
No one has the time or resources to redesign a large portion of their website, but using landing pages keeps content fresh, timely, and relevant while keeping design and development costs low.
Here are a few pointers to get you started:
- Keep the design consistent with the rest of the site.
- In addition to the landing page, include holiday offers on the homepage or banner.
- Include links or navigation back to the main site in the event that users do not find their desired offer or service.
2. Postponing a review of your sales funnel and checkout process until the last minute
Are you certain that your customer service is the best it can be? Are you willing to stake your holiday growth objectives on it?
When it comes to holiday marketing, it's critical to go through the sales process from start to finish as if you were a new customer (as many likely will be).
Look for gaps in the conversion process or areas where checkout friction could be reduced. For example, is it simple to find what you're looking for using your site's search or main navigation?
Check that all aspects of the checkout process are fast and efficient on both the desktop and mobile versions of your site. You'll want to finish this before your holiday promotional period so that any changes or updates can be made and tested before going live.
If SEO is a top priority for your launch, plan ahead of time so that your pages appear in search results when customers look for them (ideally 6-8 months in advance, but it's not too late to start now).
3. Failure to Optimize Your Mobile Site
Being mobile-friendly is essential for marketing, especially during peak shopping seasons.
For many consumers, holiday shopping is done on the go, and ecommerce sales are expected to be at least 50% mobile-driven in 2021 for the first time ever. Good mobile experiences will almost certainly increase site conversion rates.
We're also all aware that Google prioritizes rankings for mobile-friendly websites. In short, ensure that your mobile experience is as good as your desktop experience for customers.
4. Ignoring Voice Search Optimization Opportunities
Voice search may not be the industry-shattering event that was predicted, but that doesn't mean it should be ignored. This is especially true in key entertainment categories, such as recipes, which are a popular category during any holiday season.
It is still necessary to consider how to optimize your website or product pages for Alexa, Siri, and Google Home.
Answer questions about product usage and FAQs that could become featured snippets by using the appropriate structured data and fully answering user queries in a natural way that can be cribbed for voice results.
5. Failure to Prepare Your Website for a Surge in Traffic
Your website must load before potential customers lose interest. Make sure your servers can withstand higher-than-normal levels of web traffic when your sale or promotion goes live.
Ideally, the increased traffic should have little to no effect on the customers who use your site by:
- Investigate the possibility of a "failover" site, which is a backed-up server site that can handle traffic if you can't reach your host if your site goes down.
- Confirming that your payment processor is capable of handling a high volume of orders in a short period of time.
- Checking in with your merchant services ahead of the holiday to learn how the system works under these conditions and what backup options they have, as well as what other integration methods they offer to help distribute some of the checkout burden.
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