As the holiday season draws ever closer, there’s no better time than now to start planning out your marketing strategy for the season. With SEO taking time to have an effect, and competitors likely also planning out their paid advertising campaigns already, we wanted to take a look at the ways that you can get to the front of the race when it comes to your holiday marketing strategies.
When To Launch Christmas Landing Pages?
Landing pages are always a funny thing to get right when it comes to timing, especially when you’re talking about pages for special events or the Christmas period. Whilst it may be tempting to wait until December to create your Christmas landing page, when you consider the way in which SEO works, that is actually doing yourself a massive disservice.
According to industry testing and experimentation, it can now take anywhere between 1 month and 2 full years for Google to index and evaluate a landing page.
With that in mind, the earlier you can get the landing page created and pushed live onto the site, the better. You don’t have to actively promote it until December, but having it live and crawlable on the site will allow Google more opportunities to index the page.
Therefore, if you haven’t put your Christmas landing page together already, now is a very good time to do so!
How To Build Excitement For Christmas Through Social Media?
Once you have your Christmas landing page created and live on the website, you can start planning out your Christmas Social Media strategy. By using both Organic Posts and Paid Social Ads, you can both promote to your existing audience and grow your overall reach, driving users to the landing page.
By having two different campaign strategies, one for existing followers and one to drive brand awareness, gives you the best possible chance of gaining conversions from the campaigns.
However, unlike the landing page, because Social Media moves so much faster than SEO, you shouldn’t launch the campaigns until December. This way, you catch your audience when they are in the Christmas mindset, and by using Social Media rather than just relying on PPC, you can get in front of your audience even when they are chilling in bed!
When Should We Launch A Christmas PPC Campaign?
And finally, when it comes to PPC advertising through Google, timing can be invaluable. However, if you haven’t run a PPC campaign before, or are creating a whole new campaign for Christmas, Google needs time to be able to fully learn how and where to place your ads.
Therefore, it’s highly recommended to start planning out your Christmas PPC campaign now so that you can build the campaign during October and November.
Doing this will then allow you to push the campaign live towards the second half of November, giving Google two full weeks of learning before we hit December. These two weeks are incredibly important to allow Google to fully understand the optimal placement for your adverts before the rush of the Christmas period truly begins.
From there, you’ll be in a far better position once the “Christmas rush” starts, and will likely already be ahead of your competitors!
So What Is The Best Way To Plan For Christmas Digital Marketing?
In summary, the best way for you to get ahead of the game when it comes to a Christmas Digital Marketing strategy is to get started as soon as possible. You want to make sure your landing page is live well before December so that it can have the best chance at ranking organically.
Then, you should start planning out your Social Media and PPC strategies throughout October and early November at the latest, with both going live for the second half of November. This gives them time to find their footing for when the Christmas rush begins, maximising the potential return on investment from them.
If you’re not sure how best to create or structure your landing page, or what the best way to build your Social Media or PPC campaigns are, we are here to help. From planning out the ad campaigns to helping build the perfect landing page, get in touch with us today and we’ll help you get the most out of your Christmas Digital Marketing campaigns.
