Chapter 5: The Power of Crowdsourcing
Your customers, followers and fans can be the biggest voice of your holiday shopping campaign – which means crowdsourcing is ripe for picking out ideas, gathering suggestions and building community and creating goodwill.
But how do you approach it to create something that will get people engaged and involved? That’s what we’ll review in this chapter.
Let People Get Involved with Your Brand
In addition to focusing on new and innovative ways to reach out to your customers, don’t forget that the customer wants to be a part of the brands they support and buy.
Heineken gives us the perfect example of how this can be done. They understood the need for customer engagement, so they called out to their fan base with one challenge: to design their own Heineken bottle.
The actual judging process took more than five months, and a winner was selected at an influential design show in Milan, Italy. With over 2,000 high-quality entries, it was a media smorgasbord. You can see a few of them in this image, with the winning entry showcased in the center.
While Heineken’s example isn’t a holiday campaign, per se, its upscale, classy content demanded attention. And it’s a great example for even small businesses to follow. For example, you can:
- leverage short videos through Twitter’s Vine app
- host a holiday themed Instagram photo party
- do a holiday-themed recipe swap on Pinterest
Provide Additional Ways to Give
But holiday marketing is about more than just the gifts. It’s also about giving. When customers know that their purchase will not only mean something to the recipient, but also help to change and touch lives of people they don’t even know, there’s something special that warms the heart in knowing they’re doing good with every dollar they spend this season.
You can probably think of lots of creative ways to give back with every order – whether it’s a holiday-focused charity, a mission that’s near and dear to you personally, or just for fun.
MasterCard did this masterfully themselves last year by partnering with StandUp2Cancer by having their very own Ugly Sweater campaign. According to the promotion
“Wearing an ugly sweater for a day is funny. Wearing it for weeks takes commitment. And that’s the kind of commitment it takes to StandUp2Cancer.”
They invited fans and followers to take and share pictures of themselves in an ugly sweater. Then, encourage friends to pledge money on whether or not their ugly-sweater-wearing pal followed through. The proceeds go toward funding potentially lifesaving cancer cures.
As you can see, it’s a win-win – friends and family get a good laugh while helping to spread the word and help save lives.
Create a Countdown to a Special Event
There are plenty of creative countdown-style landing pages that allow you to countdown to a specific event, so if you’re looking for a way to generate holiday buzz toward a more substantial campaign (such as a contest with some highly desired prizes), a countdown can be a great way to do just that.
Then Keep the Energy Going!
Beyond the landing page, many ecommerce sites simply drop the ball. They’re often locked into old, outdated and cumbersome systems that practically hemorrhage customers at the most pivotal point: the checkout.
That being the case, how can you improve your checkout process to convince finicky holiday shoppers to stay put? Everyone wonders at the last minute if they could’ve paid less somewhere else – and the money pinch is particularly felt over the holidays. In the next chapter, we’ll look at ways to make your checkout process easy, efficient and secure, so buyers are happy to let you fill their holiday shopping needs.
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