When it comes to planning your Christmas AdWords campaigns, the trick is to beat the Christmas decorations going up in your local shopping centre. While early spring might seem too soon to kick off your holiday season campaign, it’s actually the best time to start. Once you take into consideration planning time, execution, testing, and the length of your campaign – you’ll want to get started ASAP.
This blog post covers some of the tips and tricks you can use to give yourself an edge over the competition this holiday season.
Step one: plan and budget
We’ve written about developing a strong digital marketing budget for the financial year before, but when Christmas is often a make-or-break time of year for retailers, it’s important to be realistic about how much you spend in the lead-up to the holiday season.
As part of your initial planning phase, set up a budget for your promotions that considers:
- organic search
- pay-per-click campaigns (PPC)
- promoted social posts
- ideation and content creation
You’ll also want to set clear KPIs during this stage, so you know what you’re measuring. If something isn’t meeting your targets during the campaign, you’ll be able to detect any issues early on and make agile decisions as you go.
Step two: create a clever strategy
Once you know how much you have to spend, you can start thinking of creative ideas to spend it on. You’ll want to come up with an idea for your Christmas campaign early, as most of your energy will be spent executing that idea effectively and strategically.
You might want to come up with an enticing Christmas offer that your customers are will find hard to resist — (think free express delivery before Christmas Eve.) Then you can use that key offer as the centre of your Christmas promotion.
When creating your strategy, be sure to set a realistic calendar of all your promotional activities. That means planning how long you want to promote certain products for, and when certain marketing messages will be released.
Step three: create a ‘Christmas’ page for AdWords
One great way to use AdWords for your Christmas campaign is to create a specific Christmas webpage for your seasonal campaign. This page can be targeted towards Christmas-themed ecommerce (12 Days of Christmas is always a popular theme) or whatever Christmas promotional campaign you’ve developed. Potential Christmas shoppers can be lead to this page through social media and AdWords targeted campaigns, as well as more traditional marketing strategies.
When it comes to creating effective Christmas digital campaigns, time is of the essence. That’s why it’s so important to start off on the right foot. Getting a professional team on-board to manage your Christmas marketing strategy could help your business reach fantastic heights this holiday season.
To find out what Redline Digital can do for your Christmas revenues, contact our friendly team today.