“The best way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear,” or so Buddy the Elf says. For business owners, the best ways to spread holiday cheer tend to be through sales, emails, blogs, and social media.
However, where there’s holiday cheer, holiday stress often follows. Between gift exchanges and awkward family dinners, flash deals and running out of best-selling items, getting through December can be tough.
To help, we decided to take some valuable inbound marketing tips and apply them to probable predicaments you’ll find yourself or your business in this holiday season.
SEO
Predicaments
We’ve all experienced the first awkward holiday with our significant other’s family. It might seem tempting to put on a façade and lie about your interests to fit in. The same temptation comes up when dealing with your business’ SEO – you want to do whatever it takes to get your business ranking for a prime keyword or phrase, even if it means exaggerating the truth a little.
Inbound Marketing Tips
BE YOURSELF. Make sure you accurately represent who you are to other people you’re meeting for the first time – and make sure your business is accurately represented to search engines. If you stuff your website’s title tags with keywords and phrases like “Best Holiday Gift Ideas” or “Holiday Gifts for Sale,” you’ll be uncovered as a fake if you don’t have anything to offer consumers who click through to your site.
PPC
Predicaments
Frankly, some people can be hard to impress regardless of your qualifications. Perhaps you’ve been trying to get in the good graces of your in-laws since the last holiday get-together. Or maybe your customers delete your emails and scroll past your social media posts without a second glance.
Inbound Marketing Tips
In this case, it doesn’t hurt to schmooze just a little bit. Pay-per-click allows businesses to pay for specific keywords that are related to their business and what their audience is searching for in hopes of getting found more quickly and more often in search results.
Content Marketing
Predicaments
With ecards, text messaging, and social media, it seems like the traditional forms of communication (phone calls and snail mail) are fading out. Around the holidays, it’s common to want to send well wishes to your loved ones – but which form of media should you use? Businesses don’t always have the answer to that, either. With the plethora of ways to reach out to customers, choosing the best way to send out important content weighs heavy on many marketers.
Inbound Marketing Tips
KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE. Some people love email, and others prefer the old-fashioned pen and paper – mix and match and share the holiday love in more ways than one.
Social Media
Predicaments
Holiday dinners and get-togethers are often filled with conversations about what everyone has been up to the past year. However, there’s always that one person who talks just a little too much about themselves, and you can never find a way to politely change the subject.
Many businesses are guilty of self-promotion, too – especially on social media and in longer-form content like blogs. While writing blog posts, businesses will often shamelessly fill posts with ads for their latest products or services.
Inbound Marketing Tips
REMEMBER the cocktail party rule. It works for in-person and online interactions – no one wants to just hear you talk about yourself.
In person, you likely talk about topics of interest you have in common with someone or try to share something you found interesting that you think they might too. Social media really isn’t all that different. Solve engaged users’ problems, answer questions, talk with them, tell them you’re happy they’re there, and provide them with useful, interesting, and helpful content. Social media is a great way for your business to get feedback, share news, and create connections with your customers.
Conclusion
No matter how much you anticipate and prepare for them, the holidays are bound to be stressful for one reason or another. However, we hope these inbound marketing tips help certain situations go just a little more smoothly. Happy Holidays!
