#3 Consumer Outreach Strategies This Holiday Season for Your Business Special offers targeting holiday euphoria, announced via social media at the right time, is a good recipe to break into the market and acquire customers.

Holiday season is right here - the best and busiest time of the year for all kinds of marketers. The time when sales and marketing team can meet their pending targets in a short span of time. This presents a huge opportunity for retailers, only if they know how to cash in on the season of gift-giving and group events. On the other hand, the evolution of social media has made it mandatory for marketers to come up with fresh ideas to increase customer engagement and drive sales. If you still haven't been able to formulate ground-breaking strategies to engage your customers, you're definitely losing out on some great conversions.

In this article, we've put together some of the best practices that you can use to increase customer outreach this holiday season while taking advantage of the numerous business development opportunities that this season has to offer to your business.

Special offers

This one is a no-brainer.

Customers are usually inundated with holiday promotions pertaining to offers, deals and discounts. Marketers understand the expedience of offering enticing promotions and that this is the time of the year when customers tend to spend more time browsing for the best deals across preferred brands. If you are an online business, your customers are already habituated to receiving special offers; chances are that they don't even spend more than a couple of minutes on the website if the deal is not alluring enough. Special offers targeting holiday euphoria, announced via social media at the right time, is a good recipe to break into the market and acquire customers. Creating a sense of urgency compels customers to buy the product as soon as they see the advertisement.

Video marketing and live feeds

Video marketing is an excellent way to create fresh content for your brand promotion. Live streaming during the holiday season is a great way to connect with audience through creative, fun and interactive campaigns. For example, Snapchat, Instagram Story and Facebook Live are good options to explore when designing videos/live streaming campaigns.

Your company can use an internal resource for recording and publishing videos on snapchats and other equivalent platforms. However, you'd need a full-fledged production team to create videos that attract eyeballs. Regardless of whether the video content is produced internally or through agencies, a company would do well to integrate their creative teams to brainstorm new ideas and leverage video marketing to connect with their customers. The idea is to deliver interactive campaigns that translate into leads and eventually, profits.

Utilizing mobile marketing

Mobile influenced holiday shopping is a continuing trend, and marketers have witnessed a huge shift in this category. Today, there are 35% more mobile users than desktop users and successful brands are taking all the right steps to leverage on this massive growth. Even if your maximum conversations are taking place on desktop, remember that there are consumers who research their purchases on their mobile phone prior to any purchase and if you won't make efforts to reach out to them, you'll end up losing a big slice. In short, you need to make sure that mobile remains a focal point of your holiday season marketing if you want to effectively influence and capture mobile-influenced consumer attention.

Tip:

Last minute deals and offers will not help you capture the market during the peak holiday season. You have to make sure that you plan your campaigns 2-3 months in advance and commence soft promotions. Make your customers are aware of upcoming deals so that they don't divert to other equivalent platforms in an endeavour to find better price points.

It's time to start planning your holiday season campaigns and get ready to execute them when the season sets in. When done right, these tips should help you increase brand awareness, engagement and conversions.