Despite recent concern about declining consumer confidence, this year’s holiday shopping season is on track to break records once again.
As sales hit a Christmas peak, it can be a time of intense pressure on your marketing team: expectations are high and, more than other years, much is riding on brand story and strategy to deliver on sales numbers.
Last year, we predicted that the holiday season would be make-or-break for a lot of small-to-medium sized brands and B2B companies. And we were right. The testing ground of the holiday season was the arena for a lot of fatal losses by brands who were ill prepared for an upsurge in competitiveness.
This year, branding teams need to hold the line and show a bit more ambition to pull out ahead of those who remain.
So here are 4 ways to keep your sales boosted over the holidays and start of 2022 with a bang.
Integrate CRM Capability
In order to surpass expectations, brands must integrate a powerful CRM to their sales and marketing management workflow. We’ve written about this elsewhere, but in short: a CRM gives both sales and marketing teams an invaluable resource for analytics, metrics, communication, campaign management, and more that in today’s market is simply a necessity.
CRMs take the uncertainty out of much of the customer BuyWay by rendering sales figures and customer behavior patterns in easy-to-understand charts. That way you can focus on what matters most: quality customer experience.
Holiday Ad Campaigns
Whether you’re in B2C or B2B, your team should be able to create holiday-themed content with the goal, not just of selling during the holidays, but of increasing customer engagement in the long term.
Social media is particularly useful here. Consumers love to share news on social media during the holidays. Brands that are accomplished in B2B holiday advertising will take advantage of this to spread their messages across all platforms, gaining followers and interested customers who will stick with them for the rest of 2022.
Email campaigns also work well in the holiday season, although avoiding the spam or junk folder can be tricky. So use special software—like a good CR,M, for example—to personalize messages and provide analytics that allow you to see whether you’re hitting your audience.
Make the Customer the Hero
Brands that anticipate customer needs and wants, and deliver memorable experiences across all touchpoints, will thrive in what is a highly competitive landscape.
Marketing, sales and service teams must have a clear overview of their customer BuyWay. Figure out who your buyers are and make their experience with you as frictionless and satisfying as possible. Build audience personae and analyze the results of A/B tests.
Personalize Your Strategy
Personalization is one of the main benefits of modern marketing tech—so use it!
The essential advantage of marketing automation centers on the use of advanced software tools to automate and personalize business processes. Automation allows you to create press releases, schedule social media updates, manage your email campaigns, respond to queries from customers or prospects, and schedule email newsletters.
All you have to do is log onto the online management platform and let the system handle it all for you. Modern tools let you create lists and add tags, target your message to specific personae, and analyze the number of opened emails, unsubscribes, bounces, etc.
Altogether, the right tech will enable you to create themed content tailored to the audience’s desires and needs, in addition to producing automated announcements of product releases, events like webinars, or any other information that’s important to your audience.
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