Christmas is just a week away! Can you believe it? Time has gone by so quickly this holiday sale season. Perhaps your numbers aren’t quite measuring up to what you’d hoped. That’s why we love online marketing so much. There is always room to tweak and improve marketing strategies to make immediate adjustments that can skyrocket sales literally overnight. Sometimes the best way to look forward is to first look backwards to see what lessons we can gather. Black Friday 2013 provides a number of helpful lessons that we can apply to our final holiday marketing pushes. 1. FACT: Budgets are smaller this year. This Black Friday weekend, consumers spent $1.7 billion less than they spent in 2012, according to the National Retail Federation. Perhaps your initial forecasting was a bit too optimistic. “There are some economic challenges that many Americans still face,” explained NRF chief executive Matthew Shay. The average […]
Do you have marketing weariness yet? I’ve unsubscribed from so many mailing lists I forgot I was even on — now that they have been arriving to my inbox every single day since Thanksgiving. Christmas may account for up to 40 percent of annual sales, so it’s understandable that marketers place a lot of stock in their holiday campaigns. They must be careful not to push potential customers away, however, as we saw with some of the failed Black Friday tweets. Here are 8 common holiday marketing mistakes… 1. You didn’t plan. Suddenly, it’s December — and you realize that you really had nothing special prepared. It is not enough to throw a couple of reindeer and the word “Christmas” into your marketing materials. You need a strategic game plan that includes measurable goals, benchmark deadlines, and metrics that will show if you are on-track or not. 2. You don’t have any holiday […]