Digital Marketing Trends to Consider as You Move Towards the Holiday Season
Gordon Owens
Entrepreneur that loves hosting guests at short term rental properties in my spare time
Have you started working on your holiday marketing strategy yet? If not, you’re several months behind schedule. The good news is the digital world moves very quickly, so there’s really time to catch up if you can identify and implement some of the digital marketing trends that are going to go far during the upcoming holiday season.
Identifying Digital and E-Commerce Trends
To really get a good idea of what’s going to work well in 2015, we have to start by looking back at 2014. According to Marketing Land, we can learn quite a bit about the holiday season and people’s behaviors when it comes to holiday shopping. Key notes include:
- A major shift away from Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Digital retailers are offering deals throughout the entire holiday season. While there are certainly upticks in sales on certain days, you really do need to be prepared for the entire two-month shopping season.
- Email marketing works. People claim to be tired of a flooded inbox, but “email marketing was the third largest channel, driving 17.7% of online orders.” Email may not send the shopper directly to the deal he wants, but it points him in the right direction. Email marketing was especially effective between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday – five very critical days.
There’s Still Room for Growth
We’ve been talking a lot about branding, social media optimization, and responsive web design. As the digital world evolves, speculators wonder if social buying, or purchasing from apps right within social networks (or even traffic from social to a website) will become more prominent. Believe it or not, “social media drove only 1.9% of all e-commerce orders” in 2014. That’s a very, very small number considering the very active platforms we’re looking at.
So what are you going to do? It’s obvious some of our older strategies and methods aren’t going to work as well going forward. You’re not going to be able to give them a tune-up. They’re going to need a complete overhaul, focusing more on the ways consumers are now responding in a world where print ads are good but mobile ads are easier to reach and just plain better.