Successful customer engagement is possible when you set up a strategy and plan your content calendar in advance.
Planning and creating your content right now ensures that you’ll provide your audience with engaging posts regularly for the upcoming holiday season. You’ll also build-up to the holiday sales season and get the best results for your campaigns.
Do you need ideas for varied and interesting types of content? Well, the ideas in this post will help you with just that.
Here are different ways to engage with your customer by leveraging content for the holiday season of 2020.
Share live videos
Customer sentiment during holiday sales in 2020 will be interesting to watch as the season unfolds. There are a few ways it can play out.
Many people have increased savings because discretionary spending has gone down and may shop at the same levels or even more than last year.
Others will avoid buying unless it’s for necessities while there will be people who will look at the season as a chance to indulge a little.
However upcoming sales like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the rest turn out, it’s more critical than ever to build trust. One powerful way to do this is by creating live videos.
One of the best things about modern technology and social media is that making live videos is easier than ever before. Using platforms you’re already on, like Facebook and Instagram, you can launch live videos as a type of surprise content or build audience awareness before going live.
During these live video sessions, you can answer questions, create on the spot offers, and generally engage with customers. Showing a real face behind the brand will help your audience trust you and make them more likely to buy from you, making it essential to use live video content as a key part of your strategies.
Create a 12-day drip campaign
Taking a leaf out of Ellen’s 12 Days of Giveaways program, you could set up an email drip campaign with 12 days of interesting content.
A drip campaign is an email marketing campaign where you prewrite emails and configure them to launch when specific triggers are set off. For the holiday sale season, you could create a set of 12 emails with ‘gifts’ or offers that appear in a user’s inbox every day.
These offers can include special discounts, free content, tutorials, gift cards, and more. An inducement like this can help you build an email list fast. You could also see higher engagement rates and conversions too if you plan this ahead of time and share this with your audience.
Use engaging push notifications
Done well, push notifications can create a positive experience and surprise users with helpful content or offers.
During the holiday sales season, your audience will be receptive to information that helps them achieve their goals. Work with push notifications to let visitors on your mobile or desktop site know that there are offers, tips, or other things you can help them with.
Well written and timely notifications on your desktop or mobile site will create higher engagement. Use it during the holidays to provide your best offer, and you’re sure to make it a welcome experience.
Avoid common push notification mistakes where you’re launching them too often or creating misleading messages to stop them from being a nuisance to your users.
You can also set up push notifications to create a better user experience by updating your users on shipping, discounts on pages they are seeing, and more. Using these notifications in this way will make holiday shopping a more attractive experience.
Create giveaways
The holiday season is the perfect time to do a giveaway! It resonates with the spirit of the season, creates excitement over winning an awesome prize, and will also build a buzz around your brand on social media.
Let your audience know through email newsletters, blog posts, and social media that you’re hosting a giveaway. You can tie in the method of entry to your specific goals.
For example, by asking people to subscribe to take part in a contest, you’ll build an email list. Getting people to follow you on social media as a way to enter the contest will boost your followership.
Make use of a good giveaway plugin to set up a landing page for your giveaway and to make it easy to share on social media.
Remember, you can engage your audience’ss attention long past the end date of your giveaway. Sharing information about the winners, thanking your participants, and doing follow-ups will keep you in your audience’s mind. Giveaways work on many levels and will help boost your brand image during the holidays.
Build your online community
Great brands know that their brand image rests on what customers think of them. We can influence how we look online with content, logos, and other branding choices, but it’s engagement that shapes our brand image.
One of the most powerful ways to create long-term, meaningful engagement is by building an online brand community. Building an online community takes time but it is well worth the effort. Having an enthusiastic group of engaged people around your brand or industry shows social proof. Your marketing efforts will be better received and you can get feedback and ideas to improve what you already do.
Here are some ways you can build your online community:
- Create a closed Facebook group so that your audience can have curated discussions
- Moderate forums online, for example, Reddit and other similar places to stay on track of conversations
- Build your own membership site. This could serve you best of all because you’ll never have to depend on the vagaries of social media algorithms for your content to appear in your users’ feeds
- Create online courses to provide helpful content, build a community, and engage customers all at once. Holiday-themed topics like cooking, crafts, seasonal marketing courses, and more will attract users to your brand
Conclusion
For the first time in history, we’re managing holiday marketing in the midst of a pandemic. It’s uncertain how people will respond to marketing efforts during this time.
What is essential is that businesses continue to market well and create content that helps users make better buying decisions and trust their brands.
We’ve covered a few impactful ways to engage customers with content. Leverage these techniques to see better engagement rates and to win over customers in 2020.
