The holiday season is fast approaching which means people will shop. Are you prepared? Are you worried about all the offline preparation, online promotions and the handling of social media required? This is the time your customers are glued to their monitor screens, ready to spend their dollars on gifts for themselves and others. They are looking online for unique products, reading reviews, browsing online catalogs all the time and making purchase decisions. How are you going to grab their attention amidst all the noise? Social media can be of great help as social listening tools come to your aid in the holiday season. With the right planning and the right tools, you can be more than prepared.
Setting up Holiday Season Marketing with Social Listening Tools
With Hannukah, Christmas and the New Year around the corner, gift shopping becomes the obvious focus of most people. It is necessary to pay close attention to what your audience is looking for because preferences keep changing and so do trends. Social listening tools can easily turn into the mirror on the wall which tells you what the public is most excited about, their deepest wishes and needs.
Planning and scheduling posts
At this time of the year, you’ve got your hands full and you tend to slack a little on your social media marketing efforts. However, that is practically the last thing you should be doing in today’s wired world which has many people baring their souls online. The holiday season, shopping and social media are like the Trinity. The more you post and engage, the more you are visible and more the sales for you.
To make things easier, we suggest you create a social media calendar, work on the posts beforehand and keep them scheduled so you don’t have to manually do it all the time. Also, keep the theme of your posts coherent and uniform. Your stories and posts can display similar products in varying setups and so on.
Online promotions and ads
The marketplace will get busier the more you wait. If you wish to put out promotional posts and advertisements it is advisable that you start working on them and get them submitted for approval. It is advisable to schedule the start and end dates for your ads, there’s no risk of launching early in case you schedule the dates but submit them for approval. Waiting until the last moment may get the post delayed because some sites might take longer to approve.
Don’t miss out on the trends
People never fail to express their excitement over social media and use a lot of hashtags and keywords in doing so. Social listening during the holiday season becomes more important because of this. Monitoring will help you stay updated and understand what new trends are gathering steam and why. A detailed analysis can even help you use the insights for future marketing efforts or campaigns. Some hashtags that run very popular every holiday season include:
#Holidays
#Christmas
#HomeDecor
#Halloween
#Fall
#ShopLocal
Social Engagement
Like we mentioned earlier, people are shopping online these days and the holiday season is when the marketplace is bustling. Hence, people are bound to browse through and ask questions if they are intrigued by your products. If you are not around to answer their queries they will not wait for long and you could miss out on prospective customers. Social listening tools help you keep tabs on all mentions and can alert you across your mobile devices the moment you receive a mention. This way you don’t have to be always on your toes and yet can engage with your audience immediately.
The holiday season gets really exciting on all fronts, doesn’t it? With all the tips here, we hope you will have a great social media marketing strategy in place this year. We wish you a great holiday season ahead.