Stand Out This Holiday Season: Proven Strategies to Outshine Your Competition
As they prepare for holiday promotions, my clients ask, “How can I stand out from the competition during the holidays?” If you’re wondering how to outshine your competition, this is for you!
I get asked about being competitive all year, but the answers are slightly different now.
Holiday promotions have a different energy and strategy, and I wanted to share how you can make your online business more competitive over the next several weeks. Let’s get into it.
Content Overview:
–The Grunt Test
–Leverage Personalization
–Follow the Numbers
–Amp Up the Social Proof
–Optimize for Mobile Shoppers
–Upgrade Your Digital Marketing Strategy
The Grunt Test
If there has ever been a time to review your website, social media, and other content to ensure your messaging is clear and effective, it’s now.
You could have the best business and offers on the market, but if your messaging doesn’t communicate that clearly to your ideal customer, you’ll lose those sales to a clearer business.
So, ensure your website and social media profiles pass the Grunt Test. In other words, is your message so clear that a caveman could understand it?
In 5 seconds or less of landing on your site, without ever seeing your business before, I should be able to look at your website or profile and answer three vital questions:
- What do you offer?
- How will it improve my life, or why should I care about it?
- How can I buy it?
It sounds simple… but you’d be amazed how often my clients have come to me completely unaware that their messaging wasn’t communicating their business. If possible, ask for the feedback of strangers who don’t know you so they can give you a true litmus test of whether you passed the Grunt Test.
This is especially important during the holidays because, hopefully, you’re having a seasonal influx of new customers from a cold audience and can knock your first impression out of the park.
FREE RESOURCE: The Ultimate Step-by-Step Website Audit
Leverage Personalization
Who doesn’t love feeling like they’re being cared for as an individual and not just a number?
One of the most effective ways to grab attention is to deliver a personalized experience. Personalization can boost engagement, increase conversion rates, and differentiate you from competitors offering one-size-fits-all promotions.
One great way to do this is by sending targeted emails to a segmented audience, separated by preferences, past purchases, or engagement levels to tailor your holiday offers. Personalized subject lines and messages can improve your open and click-through rates.
Follow the Numbers
Offering a good promotion comes down to understanding your ideal customer, and what better way to know your target audience than to utilize their buying behaviors to lead the way?
For example, let’s say you’re a product-based business, and you realize that a group of two or three items are commonly purchased together. You can utilize that information and create a holiday bundle of those three products (because you already know people in your target audience enjoy all three of them) and give some sort of incentive like a discount or bonus item to drive the sale.
Additionally, you can utilize dynamic content blocks and ads to re-introduce a product or service to someone who has searched for that item or something similar.
Amp Up the Social Proof
During the holiday season, customers are especially focused on making “safe” purchases, so they often seek reassurance that they’re choosing quality products from trusted businesses.
You can build trust with new customers by ensuring your products and services have ample customer testimonials, product reviews, or influencer recommendations.
The more recent the positive reviews and testimonials, the better!
Another great way to do this is to incorporate user-generated content (UGC). This growing marketing strategy encourages customers to share photos or videos of your product or service on social media, humanizing your brand and creating a sense of community.
FREE RESOURCE: Making the Most of Social Media
Optimize for Mobile Shoppers
Have you ever been shopping online and frustrated with how the website worked that you immediately clicked away and never returned? Yeah, me too.
If you don’t want your customers to do that when they land on your website this holiday season, you’ll want to ensure you’re offering a seamless mobile experience. This will help with conversions and also help you rank better in mobile search results, increasing your online visibility.
Optimizing images, reducing unnecessary code, and using accelerated mobile pages (AMP) to enhance loading speed are all ways to reduce page loading speed as much as possible.
Also, make sure it’s easy to check out. Ideally, the process from landing on your website to completing their purchase should be no more than 3-5 clicks. So, if needed, reduce the number of steps in the checkout process and minimize that friction.
Upgrade Your Digital Marketing Strategy
If you want your business to stand out from the competition during the holiday season, you must approach your marketing strategically, emphasizing the customer experience at every touchpoint.
And if I’m honest, I know that all the techniques I’ve mentioned above are much easier said than done. Maybe you’re not a digital marketing strategist, a website designer, an ads specialist, or an expert copywriter. So what can you do?
Well, at Jennie Lyon Digital Marketing Services, we have a team of experts at our client’s disposal, giving your business the productivity of a 20+ person team without hiring and managing a large team.
We are currently accepting new clients, which means all you have to do is schedule your free consultation call to talk about your goals, and then we will figure out how we will move forward to grow your business!
FREE RESOURCE: How to Use Our Digital Marketing Team to Grow Your Business
Links for This Episode:
– Marketing Office Hours
– Discover Your Digital Marketing Success Path
– How to Use Our Digital Marketing Team
– Schedule a free call with Jennie today
Get in touch with Jennie:
-Free Consultation: https://jennielyon.com/chatwithjennie
-Website: jennielyon.com
-Social Media: @jennielyonmarketing
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