social media tips for holiday shopping

4 Tips to Boost your Social Media Strategy this Holiday Season

Written by: Katie Lipsett, Content Marketing Strategist

 

While it’s mid-October and our minds are on Halloween and football, we all know how quickly the holiday season is approaching. Now is the perfect time to start gearing up your social media strategy for the gift-buying rush. After all, there has been an 87% increase in the share of orders placed through social media over the last two years. It has also been found that almost 50% of millennial shoppers tap social channels to buy online and use those channels to research products and companies before buying.

Consumers want brands to be social; just like they are. Social media is a powerful tool, especially during the holiday season, as it helps brands become closer to their shoppers by allowing them to meet their consumers along every step of the buyer’s journey. Whether your customer clicks on your social platforms to get help addressing an issue, to find the perfect gift, or to figure out if you’re the company they want to buy from, be sure your social strategy is ready for the busiest time of the year. Here are 4 tips to get you started:

 

1. Make sure your social media channels are staffed 24/7.

This might sound like a heavy load to lift, but it’s important. Having a constant eye on social interactions and community management is key to delivering superb customer service. 20% of shoppers say they use social media channels to request customer service from online retailers and 67% of shoppers say they prefer support on social media channels over phone calls. Make sure you’re equipped with an adequate community management team in order to give your brand’s customer service satisfaction a boost and eliminate missed sales opportunities.

 

2. Use visual-meets-social tactics.

With Instagram quickly becoming the #1 social platform, driving a 51% year-over-year increase in traffic to retail sites, Snapchat following close behind, and Facebook being more visual-focused than ever before, it’s now vital that your brand is giving people what they want to see – visuals. Keeping the visual-centric trend in mind, it’s important to create a strategy that uses photos and videos as a main source of content in order to drive people to your website during the busy holiday season. Perhaps an unboxing video or photos of your holiday decorations going up?

 

3. Give customers an extra boost to close the sale.

Who doesn’t love a good sale, especially during the holiday season? An exclusive holiday offer to your social followers is a proven tactic for driving loyalty and boosting sales. If you’re using multiple channels like email or direct mail to drive promotions, create different codes for the different channels to make tracking easier and to create a bigger impact. Resurface abandoned cart items through social remarketing ads on Facebook or Instagram and utilize dynamic product retargeting ads to get people who visited products on your website back to make the purchase. To stay top-of-mind during the holiday season, make sure you’re giving your customers the extra boost they might need to pull the trigger on a purchase.

 

4. Go above and beyond!

Your social community is managed, you’re equipped with branded and eye-catching visuals, and you have your promo calendar ready to roll. But what else can you be doing to REALLY move the needle?

Try launching holiday gift guides. People love convenience; and a guide that includes all of the must-haves and nice-to-haves, with shopping links and descriptions all in one place, offers the ultimate convenience. If your brand has multiple target personas, create multiple gift guides. Then, push these out to the right people through targeted Facebook ads.

Ramp up staff training beyond just product knowledge. Black Friday and Cyber Monday will be here before we know it. Be sure your store associates, sales teams, and service agents are prepared to offer customers ways to deepen their digital engagement with your products and your company. Create easy ways for customers to notice and follow your social platforms and provide sign-ups for promotional emails. Once you have this valuable data, you can use in future marketing campaigns.

 

Get started before it’s too late.

So there you have it. Get social with your holiday marketing efforts and prepare to see a notable pay-off. If you could use an expert social media marketing partner during this upcoming holiday rush, leverage us.

 

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