Holiday Gift Guides are a popular way to engage audiences during the holiday season, and publishing guides early in the season engages your buyers well ahead of the prime-shopping time.
You can start with popular gifting ideas that cue in the season and engage the shopper for all possible options that are available. Content and App marketers that are looking at publishing Holiday Gift guides can start as early as September, with products and gift ideas that are likely to be engaging for the audience.
A popular approach to Gift Guides is to classify your best-sellers with the price range and promote the collection to an identified target audience. You may choose other themes based on a segment that you are targeting with popular gift choices as seen in “Gift For bakers” image below.
Brick-or-Treat Party nights at LegoLand California and Florida are packed with more fun with Live Shows, Costume Contests, Character Meet and Greets and Live Band. With party nights designed to pack in the spooktacular fun for the weekend nights throughout the month of October, LegoLand has extended park open hours. Among other attractions of the park the Halloween promotion features, Ghost Cruise, The BooGrass Band. M&Ms earlier announced the launch of Booterskotch flavor. Other brands have launched seasonal favorites such as Oreo Pumpkin Spice Sandwich cookies and Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte, making the brand messaging more resonant.
Research has proven that engaged Twitter users for Seasonal campaigns bring about 6.4X sales lift. Promoting your brand’s message with a seasonal context and increasing the engagement with Fans and Audiences requires a focused social media and content marketing strategy.
Five Way Brands Can increase Engagement With Seasonal Promotions
Long-form Posts
One of the best ways to give information about your offers and promotions is a Branded post hosted on your site, optimized with Keywords. In the post for Lego Land, The site lists the main attractions for the party night along with visuals that are illustrative. With featured posts and visuals, Lego Land posts work to engage the audience with their favorite Halloween themed events, along with Event Guide and Questions. As the brand posts go a long way in engaging users, publisher and other trusted site’s posts build on the theme for seasonal campaigns.
Promoted Posts
Promoting your event on Facebook with promoted posts can help you target the audience based on Demographics, interests as well as custom audiences targeting users who have earlier visited your site for events.
Targeting, Placement of Ads and Objectives are key in building on your Facebook ad efficiency, with nearly 70 percent of reach on Facebook now being paid for advertising. On an average 25 percent of the posts seen by a Facebook user are Pages post, of which nearly 10 percent are promoted. To get your posts featured in the Users News Feed Use Interests to get the best response for theme based posts.
Search Optimization
Optimize your site content and featured offers with text that contains keywords, users are most likely searching for. In addition to hosted content that is searchable, Reviews, ratings and guest posts that are featured in search results can build trust for your brand and make your events as well as Halloween themed promotions look credible.
Promoted Tweets, Lead Generation Cards and Twitter Carousels
Much like the promoted posts, promoted Tweets and Twitter Carousels can help you reach target audiences based on promoted trends, or other targeting capabilities such as age, income, education or even the mobile carrier. For further engagement think about Lead Generation card on Twitter. When you add this capability to your Twitter campaign post, your fans can click a link that brings up a form already populated with their Twitter data: name, email address, and Twitter handle. Engaged Twitter Users are known to drive 6.4X sales lift according to Twitter’s research. As engagement brings about a greater purchase, the frequency of posts and limited time messaging also increase sales, according to the Twitter research.
Video
Create an engaged viewer experience by adding Haul and Prank videos to your Halloween content. Haul videos are popular during the Holiday season. Creating the same with a seasonal context and for a targeted audience increases the engagement.
Use Video for Storytelling. Target followed Brand Storytelling approach that engaged users with an approach that cued in great offers and deals for Holiday Season and followed it up with a promotional video spot that announces Ten Days of Deals.
According to a quantitative study by IPG Lab and Forbes in collaboration with Syracuse University, “Storytelling : The Current State of Branded Content”,Branded content is proven to perform for memorability, brand perception and purchase intent/ consideration. With over 40 different test conditions, for different verticals and different types of content as well as Level of Branding, it was proven that Branded Content works for Brand Performance with high scores for aided and unaided ad recall, purchase intent and consideration.
The key findings from the study are:
Branded Content Works: Branded content is highly effective across the branding funnel and outperforms display ads. In addition to aided recall’s 59 percentage point increase, brand favorability was 7 percentage points higher and purchase consideration was 9 percentage points higher
Branded Content Holds Up Over Time: Despite the loss of novelty often seen with ad products across time, branded content was as effective, if not more so, in 2016 compared to results seen in the 2013 study.
Brand Interest Increases with Branded Content:Branded content may drive lasting interest in the brand. Consumers were 14 percentage points more likely to say they intend to seek out more information about the brand in the future. After seeing Branded Content, viewers are more likely to seek Branded Content from the site.
Don’t Be Afraid to Mention Your Brand:‘Higher Branding,’ defined as 2x the number of brand mentions, caused brands to be perceived as more educational by over 7 percentage points and performs better on mobile devices.
Longer Form Branded Content Drives Millennial Purchase Consideration:18-34 year olds responded better to long articles, driving higher engagement consideration rates and aiding recall.
Branded Content Is Perceived Better:Consumers perceive branded content as being more consumer-centric because it is less about selling products and more about providing value to consumers.
Generating awareness with existing fans and followers for new launches and campaigns that require users to interact with your products increases engagement and conversions. Highlighting offers with a call to action increases awareness, and brings in the required click-through rate. Create a sense of urgency with your messages.
Engage your audience with content ideas that resonate with them in the context. Offering a freebie during the holiday season deepens the emotional bond with your brand. Include images and content for seasonal packs.
Start a series that creates an ongoing engagement with shoppers that start shopping early. This can be done with Early bird offers and clever ways to prepare for seasonal celebrations. The type of content that works for different content Genre based on a study of over a million posts by Buzzsumo and the results you can expect by way of traffic generation varies. Choose the type of content that works for your category.
Holiday Gift Guides are a popular way to engage audiences during the holiday season, and publishing guides early in the season engages your buyers well ahead of the prime-shopping time.
