Sales Never Stop: How to Leverage the Holiday Season Lull

If you focus on the humanisation of your company, highlighting the effectiveness of your employees, you’ll connect effectively with the community at large. This is the case for marketing and the December break where we need to ramp up content creation and distribution. Staying active over the year-end doesn’t just benefit your marketing efforts, it helps you grow your market share. Active campaigning by your competitors can compromise your market share. Stats and results mentioned throughout this blog come from a LinkedIn seasonality study that is openly available for all. ?

In this blog I've put forth a new form of marketing for our unique audience. Your audience is always on, and they expect you to be too. It’s a better fit for most B2B buyer journeys than a campaign. Digital marketing leaders who properly engage with consumers will win this holiday season and beyond. ?

Always On Approach?

The always on approach is a departure from a 'campaign-based' mentality of a traditional publisher, whose monthly or quarterly print magazine appears after long periods of nothing (aka campaign approach), and embracing a steady stream of valuable digital content every day regardless of the season.??

Always-on protects your share of voice. One of the key features used by the company is the optimisation provided by AI. What’s more, the content is streamlined based on the information that the audience provides. Personalisation is both expected and builds trust. This modality also has financial benefits in the long-term. ?

Meet Audiences Where They Are ?

One-size-fits-all email marketing no longer plays a role in your day-to-day marketing. Customers want to be treated as individuals. Since internet users volunteer personal information with websites, they want to see it used with personalisation. According to a McKinsey report, 76% of the customers expressed frustration when the content they’re served isn't personalised. ?

The need is to intervene at the beginning of the consumer journey. You need to create constant value when they start to research, learn and educate themselves.?Design a customer experience with always-on activities or content, and marketers can be sure that they fit their customer's needs. ?

Action in Motion

There are over 3.8 million professionals in Singapore on LinkedIn who continue to consume content during the year-end. Our platform data from the 2021 year-end season reveals an average increase of 34.5% in engagement among key audiences including Business Decision Makers, IT Decision Makers, SMB Employees and Vice Presidents.??

What to Do?

You may be asking yourself at this point, ‘What do I do with this information?’ Keeping in mind the year-end holiday season, consider reviewing and identify your best-performing, organic and paid content throughout the year. What had above-average reach, engagement or clicks? It’s time to boost this content while it’s still relevant.?

Secondly, you know your audience and if possible, predict the customer trends. One of the ways is to analyse your organisation's earlier campaign strategies - look for what worked and what didn’t. Repurpose, test, make iterations. ?

Lastly, two actions are derived from Forbes’ writer Spencer Hadelman. “Make your brand feel authentic, keep up your persona. At the same time, personalise and customise it to give it that personal touch. Maybe an article illustrating how the product came to be or collaborating with other brands with similar philosophies.”?

Wrapping up, I'll summarise the main pointers to be a creative campaign this holiday season.

• Play with the brand’s voice, distribution and content assets.
• Test to see what is resonating and use those leanings to build better content in the new year.
• Try to focus on your brand, not the product. It definitely has a long term impact on your customer journey.
• Lastly, use these skills for an ‘always on’ approach in B2B sales.

If you want to know more about your B2B year end demand strategy please feel free to reach out. I have information and data that would be specifically useful for the following countries: Singapore, SEA, India, Australia, N.America and EMEA.

Happy Holidays!