Time to read: 3 minutes
We know that the holiday season is weeks away, but when it comes to digital marketing, waiting until November is too late!
Potential customers are already researching, browsing, and planning their end-of-year purchases. The earlier you position your brand and prep your campaigns, the better chance you’ll have at capturing that traffic before your competitors do.
Below, we’ve put together a Q4 checklist to help you get ahead of the game and ensure your brand can dominate across every marketing channel.
Search Engine Optimization
- Refresh and optimize category/product pages with holiday keywords
- Create gift guides and seasonal landing pages, such as “Best [Product] for [Recipient]” category pages
- Update meta descriptions with holiday offers and urgency
- Consider adding schema markups for promotions and events
- Write blog content around holiday themes relevant to your industry
- Check if any old seasonal pages have been redirected or noindexed
- Add promotional offers to your Google Business Profiles
Pay Per Click
- Start crafting new campaigns, or refresh paused seasonal campaigns
- Begin building audiences for remarketing
- Prep ad copy with new limited-time holiday offers
- Plan your budget to account for increases on specific sales days like Cyber Monday
Email Marketing
- Start designing holiday-themed graphics to showcase promotions
- Plan out when you’re going to send pre-sale teasers, gift guides, and last-minute deals
- Create different segmented lists based on interests, engagement, and more
- Refresh any abandoned cart emails to entice holiday shoppers
Social Media
- Prep and schedule paid social campaigns for early holiday shoppers
- Align your social posting schedule with your email campaigns
- Plan time to look at and repurpose user-generated content in real time
- Film and post teasers for new product drops, order packing, and employee interviews for engagement
- Consider testing interactive polls, quizzes, and live streams
- Refresh profiles on shopping-friendly platforms like Pinterest and TikTok
Conversion Rate Optimization
- Add banners and CTA buttons for holiday promotions
- Check contact, quote request, and checkout forms for efficiency
- Ensure pages include order and shipping cut-off dates
- Add “limited stock” messaging where needed
- Update outdated photos to help entice customers
- Check your website’s mobile performance and usability
- Consider enabling different payment options, such as PayPal or Venmo, to help create quicker checkouts
The Importance of a Strong Holiday Marketing Strategy
Wondering if you really need to put a lot of effort into your holiday campaigns? Here are some compelling statistics that illustrate that if you’re not tailoring your marketing for holidays you’re missing out!
- About 30% of shoppers start doing their holiday shopping as early as October!
- During the holidays, ad bids soar by over 140% compared to the rest of the year.
- In 2024, over 55% of shoppers admitted that they planned on doing a majority of their holiday shopping online.
- The biggest holiday spending is usually focused on gift cards, toys and hobbies, and health and wellness items.
- Nearly 70% of shoppers pay more attention to emails from companies around Christmas.
- 42% of holiday shoppers like supporting local businesses over chain stores.
Need Some Support for Your Q4 Strategy?
If you’re too busy dealing with your logistics partners or ensuring that your team can handle incoming sales orders, we understand that marketing might fall by the wayside. Don’t worry, though, because that’s where our team of digital marketing pros comes in to give you a helping hand.
Learn about the marketing packages we offer that can help you get through Q4 and beyond by contacting us today!
