4 Marketing Guidelines For Planning 2014 Holiday Season

To make the 2014 holiday season as your best online business deal, you need to plan and be well-prepared ahead. As a saying “If you fail to plan you plan to fail” - Benjamin Franklin.

In this post, we will show you 4 important marketing guidelines for planning 2014 Holiday season.

Let’s get started.

1. Choose holidays to participate

The first important step is to determine which holiday you will take part in. There are multiple holidays occurring in the last two months. If you choose all of them for promotion, it would be crazy. So make a smart choice.

If you are new to the business, the biggest ones should be on the top choices, such as: Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Christmas.

2. Create a timeline

Now, you have holiday choices in your mind already. It is time to write down what and when will be next steps. If you don’t want to be overwhelmed when holiday comes, arrange things strategically ahead. A simple clear timeline will help you to visualize the promotional picture.

In this timeline, you note all the necessary phases of the promotion from starting date till the end. Such following things you can add as:

+ Dates of starting recording, posting video.

+ Date of sending email

+ Date of posting promotional information on social networks

+ Date of starting and ending advertisement

3. Choose types of promotions

At a time every retailer offers attractive promotions, determine the types of promotion becomes very difficult. People are too tired with “SALE OFF” signal everywhere. What will be the most appealing to them? Here is a list of 15 promotion ideas you could plug throughout the season.

4. Determine which internet marketing channels you will engage

No matter you are a big or small business, choosing advertising channel to promote marketing campaign should be strategic. Instant appearing in many channels does not promise a successful campaign.

How to choose the best internet marketing tools among numerous ones?

The answer depends mainly on your type of business, the kinds of target customers. You need to perform a careful plan of actions that enables you to test and measures results of suitable marketing channel.

Here are some popular internet marketing channels, you should consider:

- Email marketing: It is one of the most effective digital marketing channels and ROI is up to 4,300%. Firstly, choose a third-party email marketing service you are interested in. Secondly, you must build a list of customers. Remember to classify customers into different group such as: First-time customers, loyal customers, VIP member, etc. With different target group, you should design suitable email content and format. Big e-commerce companies integrate with MailChimp, ConstantContact, and iContact. Once you’ve decided which provider to go with, setup is simple.

If you are Magento Store, having an automatic sending email system is easy with powerful Magento extension. Follow up Email Pro by MageWorld is one effective tool helping ecommerce owner instantly take care of customers through email.

- Blog posts: “Content is the king” so regardless if you are a small business, or a multinational company, blogging should integral to your online content marketing strategy. A good blog will drive traffic to your website, increase SEO/ SERP, develop better customer relationships.

Integrated CMS Pro extension in your Magento store helps to publish blog posts easily.

-  Facebook Ad: Facebook Ad is a great way to get your promotion exposed to target demographic. With less than 30 minutes, even you are new to facebook ads, you can set it up by yourself.

Hopefully, with these 4 early planning steps, you will have a map of holiday season campaign, then come to the next steps with confidence.