Having a clear content strategy is a game changer for business owners to have at all times but especially during the holidays. Given the abundance of businesses trying to get in their posters and pop up markets, it’s easy to say that the job of marketing can become quite challenging. If you’re feeling deflated with stress, relax because we have explored 10 ways to master your holiday content strategy!
Anticipate the trends
Given that the holiday season is a yearly occurrence, business owners can anticipate old and new trends that may take an upward stride during this time. With this knowledge and research, business owners can easily derive conclusions about what people crave most during these months. (Whether it’s online shopping made easy, some killer sales and discounts or even just complimentary gestures!) Your business can cater directly to what the facts suggest and perfect a strategy!
Ask your audience
If you’re having a hard time researching trends in your area of business, don’t hold back on asking the direct recipients of your hardwork… your customers! They will surely have a lot to say about their preferences regarding content and news. You don’t have to bombard them with direct, stringent questions but rather, you can do surveys which work especially great on Instagram! These questions can be super specific to your audience or rather general, such as the following:
- What’s your main concern going into the holiday season?
- What are you looking for from your favourite business, this season?
- How are you preparing for the festive season?
Audit your current content
Before you devote precious time to creating new seasonal content, do yourself a favour and scan through what you have used in previous years. You might just find material that is relevant enough to be reused or maybe it needs an update and it can be recycled! Similarly, if you are a newer business, it might make sense to start completely from scratch. Remember, while your strategy should be implemented to make things easier, it should also not be compromising the integrity of your business.
Dive into the world of creative content planning
Once you have some preliminary knowledge about what your audience wants to see and what has or has not worked in the past, you can start engaging in the fun and creative part of content planning… creation! You might also want to be a little more technical with your ways of working, you could do this by “keyword research” , which can help you optimize your mobile search result frequencies. Another tip is to take full advantage of social media platforms and cater directly to each of their individual trends such as Facebook with direct posts, Instagram with stories and Twitter with pure text.
Match concepts with your goals
While strategically planning out content spreads for the holiday season, it is important to stick to your goals and plan only what you can knowingly achieve because risk-taking and holiday season do not go well together! Only take on as much as you can here and leave the next steps for drier months like February. For example, if you want to optimize your social media advertisements, it would be counterproductive to your goal to spend hours on email marketing, so plan according to your missions and set goals.
Organize topics by priority and logical order
Your main goal with content planning should be relevance and branding. These content ideas should be consistent with your brand and mission. With this, content spread should also be released in an order of logic. If you have an article titled “How to Prepare for Holiday Traffic”, it would obviously appear before something like “What to do with the Excess Holiday Traffic”. Ordering your content can also help your audience members navigate your page better.
Share seasonal photos
Images are always very captivating and lure people right into your content, so do yourself a favour and invest in some good quality photos which can in turn, be recycled and used for other social media platforms. This will reflect wonderfully on you as you’re putting in great effort to uplift your content and the recycling will also save you a lot of money.
Advertise your content across all platforms
Why should you use only one platform to advertise when you have the convenience of using more to optimize your business? This will drive and circulate traffic, bring more awareness to your online presence and give an overall boost to your business within the social community. If managing multiple profiles and platforms is too hard for you, you can even use tools like Hootsuite to schedule posts with captions and visuals well in advance, this will save you time and peace of mind as it will keep all your posts organized!
Analyze your results
It’s encouraged to keep up with the analytics of your online presence and engagement, whether it is to stay involved with an influx of traffic or on the other hand, putting in twice the work to give a push for your content to go ‘viral’. Similarly, this will require strategy so be prepared to address any questions pertaining to your recent posts and have backup ideas ready in case some of your content repeatedly doesn’t work.
Apply past lessons to future content
Whether it is your first or hundredth time organizing content for the holiday season, it is imperative that you have an understanding of what the holiday trends look like in the current year. Learn what works and what doesn’t. Even though you might feel like you want to indulge in some new steps, try holding off. Experimenting during the holiday season is not the best idea. Instead, try perfecting the traditional content spreads to optimize your business.