Content Marketing
The Right Way To Produce Content for the Holidays

The Right Way To Produce Content for the Holidays

November 28, 2020
4 min read

It’s here. The holiday season. Everybody’s minds turn to gift giving and preparing for family and friend to visit. It can be hard to plan content for this time of year because people’s buying habits change so much.

Deciding the right tactic is hard, especially when combined with the stress that comes at the end of the year. To help you produce powerful content for the holiday season and beyond, here are a few tips, tactics, and pieces of advice to read over.

Update Your Personas?

People change during these final months of the year. The normally cool and collected stay at home Mom gets stressed with gift buying, baking treats, hordes of company and more.

The smaller business owner or manager might be unwilling to make purchases because their yearly budget is nearly spent. Even the typical consumer changes from the rest of the year when buying products.

So, even if your product or service isn’t something that is bought as a gift, your persona’s still need to change. How people shop during this time changes, so your marketing needs to adapt. The changes might be minor, maybe to account for extra stress, or it could be huge. Possibly, you might need to change your whole strategy to best target your market.

Before you make any content, update your personas, or decide if you even need them at all. Failing to do this could lead to a poor month, sales wise, and missing out on connecting with current and future customers. You can even adapt your personas throughout the month by keeping an eye on your analytics for drastic changes, positive or negative.

Holiday Specific Keywords

People look and search very differently around the holidays. Specific keywords have drastic spikes that only happen during November and December. Some make perfect sense, like Black Friday or pumpkin spice lattes, because they are only relevant at this time of year.

Others might be harder to find, but making them more valuable as they are less obvious. Most retail businesses will run a Black Friday deal of some sort, making it difficult to compete with, especially against larger corporations. You can use resources like Google Trends to better analyze what keywords to target, especially long tail key terms, based off data from previous years.

Skip The Gift Guides, Create A Journey

It might seem an easy fix to create a gift guide to help visitors choose your product, but this only serves as a decision stage piece. Many people might look at a guide, looking for ideas, but not purchase anything from them. They are going through a buyer’s journey, just like any other purchase, and your content needs to reflect that. Just because it’s the holidays doesn’t mean people automatically skip the necessary stages.

If you sell products and services that can be given as gifts, and the holidays are a big time for you, focus on building a full marketing funnel. Have blog articles designed to help people identify what types of gifts the person they are shopping for would like.

Then, point them to a specific type of product and why it makes a good gift. Finally, hit them with why your version of the product is the best. All of this should be done in separate pieces of content, ranging from blog articles, videos, and product pages.

Keep Posting Regularly

It’s easy to fall behind during the holiday season. People go on vacation, take on big projects, get distracted with company and personal parties, and get caught up in the spirit of the season. Keeping a regular posting schedule is important to ensure people keep coming to your site.

Most companies kick up their advertising during this season to get higher profits. Content marketing should be no different. More content means better SEO and better reach with your target market. It can also help keep your social media platforms active with more than just deals.

Being Festive Without Going Overboard

People love the holidays. It’s why some call it the “most wonderful time of year.” So being festive can be a good thing, if only to help make connections with your consumers. The problem is that people go overboard with being festive with their website.

If you spice up your website to help it become festive, take a moment to pause and ask yourself, “Is this an eye sore? Do the traditional colors of red and green clash with the color scheme of our site? Is the silly snow falling animation that covers the text and brings practically nothing to the site simply distracting?”

If you answered no to those questions, then you’ll probably be fine to put it up. Go ahead and dress up your site a little bit, just be careful not to go overboard. Keeping a responsive and friendly UX on your site goes hand in hand with profits.

Additionally, go ahead and get a little festive with your content. It’s ok to share some photos on social media of the company holiday party or post an article about traditions, but don’t let it replace meaningful content. All this festive content should be designed to do is so consumers and customers that you’re a company made up of real people. That you’re trustworthy and friendly.

What do you do to increase viewers and profits around the holidays? Do you have a marketing tradition you would like to share with us? Let us know in the comments below.

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Michael Brenner

Michael Brenner is an international keynote speaker, author of "Mean People Suck" and "The Content Formula", and Founder of Marketing Insider Group. Recognized as a Top Content Marketing expert and Digital Marketing Leader, Michael leverages his experience from roles in sales and marketing for global brands like SAP and Nielsen, as well as his leadership in leading teams and driving growth for thriving startups. Today, Michael delivers empowering keynotes on marketing and leadership, and facilitates actionable workshops on content marketing strategy. Connect with Michael today.

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