Chapter 4: Leveraging Social Media over the Holidays

The best part about the holidays is the spirit of giving and sharing – and social media was built for it! You can get creative here and really look for ways to make your brand stand out in many different ways.

Sometimes, however, the most tried-and-true approaches work best.  In this chapter, we’ll take a closer look at proven winners and unique angles that can springboard your social media efforts this season.

Here are a few ideas…

Wish lists are a great way for busy shoppers to stay organized – but they also help keep your brand front-of-mind during the bustle of the season.

And it’s not just for major holidays – life events and special milestones like weddings, births, graduations and more can all benefit from wish lists.

Even events that span several weeks on the calendar, like hunting season, can excite customers and encourage a higher order volume of items added to cart during checkout.

Back in 2009, beauty retailer Sephora encouraged customers to create wish lists.  It then aggregated them into a feed and granted one wish a day for 30 days.

Keep in mind, this was even before mobile shopping really took off – so a campaign like this could be built around location-based coupons and deals to mobile-browsing customers for even greater reach.

Around a year ago, Blue Nile, a retailer of fine jewelry, was noticing that a great deal of its traffic was coming from Pinterest.  They discovered that people were pinning and sharing pictures of jewelry for events and to help organize different ideas and inspiration.

Seizing on an opportunity, Blue Nile created its own Pinterest account to show off different themed ideas for a variety of events – from fall foliage to weddings and more:

Blue Nile’s Pinterest account

As you might imagine, Valentine’s Day is the holiday where jewelers stand to reap huge profits. So, Blue Nile started a contest wherein users had to follow them on Pinterest, then re-pin three diamond rings from the “Be My Valentine” board in order to be entered to win a $900 diamond ring.

The results: During the 8-day contest, Blue Nile netted 5,000 more followers (they typically got 1,500 new followers in the same time frame before the contest), and their diamond rings were shared over 50,000 times.  That represented 50,000 opportunities to showcase their brand in front of thousands of people.

You can use a Pinterest-based monitoring and analytics system like Piqora to determine the effectiveness of your campaigns.  The system also works with Tumblr and Instagram.

It’s vital to remember that now is not the time to bombard customers with messages. Their social media feeds and timelines are already blown up out of proportion. The key is to interact with the attention you get – and make participating in your holiday promotions fun and engaging.

Surprisingly, coupons that are doled out via social networks may not get the response you’d hope, especially if they don’t have a traditional barcode to go along with them.  Many stores won’t accept printed coupons – which can lead to more blowback from frustrated customers.

Plus, there’s just too much chatter and a flood of deals that may make yours get lost in the crowd.  Instead, consider looking at mobile-based coupons to reach out and connect with customers beyond the din of the social web.

Services like StarStar (in the US) enable brands to create a custom name that follows pressing the star (*) key twice. Once an ad is aired, placed in a newspaper, or delivered via SMS, the customer can type the coupon code to view the offer.

StarStar is an example of a coupon redemption + mobile
outreach promotional program

Case in point – Omaha Steaks delivered a 20% off coupon to customers who used the **OMAHA code on their mobile phones, and enjoyed a coupon conversion rate of over 35%.

Omaha Steaks used mobile advertising to encourage
coupon redemption to select customers

All major US wireless carriers including AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile are already enabled with ** functionality.

Beyond these points, make sure that your holiday advertising and promotions are appropriate for your core audience, rather than trying to make a blanket appeal to everyone.  Sometimes companies try far too hard to make their message as innocuous and simple as possible in an attempt to be all things to all people.

But this can then backfire with your crowd of true fans and supporters, who will see right through the “smokescreen” and wonder what happened to the message of the brand they loved!

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Helpful Holiday Checklist…

►  Have you created a holiday-themed gift guide or filtered search/suggestion tool that visitors can use to find the perfect gift?

►  Have you integrated a wish list feature within your shopping cart? Many users add an item to their cart when they really want to save it for later – then wonder why it disappeared. Wish list functionality can remove this obstacle.

►  Are you interacting with customers and responding to them (even the complaints!) on social media?

►  Have you considered using mobile coupon redemption programs to encourage customer interaction through your responsive website?

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Even though there are a lot of great suggestions here, sometimes the best way to build up “mindshare” over the holidays is to let your customers do the talking!  In the next chapter, we’ll look at crowdsourcing ideas from previous holiday campaigns of businesses both large and small to give you some great inspiration!

 

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