Boost Your Holiday Retail Marketing Strategy
Is your holiday marketing strategy aligned with your sales goals this season? Year after year, retailers, wholesalers, and small business owners work endlessly to find the perfect marketing strategy for the most profitable time of the year: the holidays. Keeping abreast of seasonal opportunities while clearly differentiating yourself from competitors is no easy task, but planning in advance, being crystal clear about your goals, and letting inspiration take over the stress is guaranteed to set you up for holiday marketing success.
Amid tough financial times, it’s a reassuring surprise that consumers remain as happy as ever to give, receive, and spread the holiday cheer with tangible gifts. More interestingly, shoppers are willing to reduce other expenses just to avoid having to sacrifice gift buying and giving. With such a huge potential seasonal payout, there’s no better time than now to show customers how valuable they are by delivering a highly engaging digital shopping experience.
Whether you want to showcase your best products with colorful images and videos, spread on-brand messaging across social media, or stay top of mind through carefully crafted newsletters, having a retail marketing strategy in place is crucial. You’ll drive more sales when shoppers are on the lookout for the next thing to buy.
Before we get down to the nitty-gritty of how to boost your holiday retail marketing strategy to skyrocket your sales, let’s uncover what holiday retail marketing is all about.
What is Holiday Retail Marketing?
If you already own the classic tactics down to a tee, all you have to do when it comes to holiday retail marketing is add seasonal cheer into the mix with the evergreen goal of driving more engagement and sales. From offering customers a shoppable experience with a digital catalog to keeping them engaged with your brand through video marketing, you have a great range of options for promoting your business this season. Stay “a-sled” of the curve by positioning your retail business as the best shopping source for holiday products, be they gifts or personal must-haves. So, get all snuggly and discover how simple it is to turn your next holiday marketing ideas into compelling digital content powerhouses with Issuu.
Best Marketing Materials for The Holidays
Creating and sharing marketing materials as a method to reach and convert customers sounds intimidating, but it is such a quick and easy way to immerse consumers in a fully personalized shopping experience. Ramp up sales this season and simultaneously save time and effort with Issuu’s versatile features that make promoting your digital retail marketing assets a breeze. Between getting creative with our Canva and InDesign integrations to dynamically weaving on-brand messaging into your campaign with the power of GIFs, rest assured you can easily put all your holiday marketing ideas into practice with our platform.
1. Digital Gift Guides
Shopping for unique gifts every year can be a hassle for some consumers, so retailers that can alleviate this pain will be the winners during the holiday season. Attract, engage, and ultimately help shoppers find the perfect gifts by creating a digital gift guide that’s exciting to read and easy to use for inducing that extra inspiration we all look for every year. As a cherry on top, embed your gift guide anywhere and everywhere on your website to offer shoppers what they seek right where they need it.
2. Digital Gift Catalogs
As you launch your holiday marketing plan, draw people into an impactful shopping experience where they can see, engage with, and buy all the seasonal essentials within a skillfully made digital gift catalog. Keeping customers engaged with your products means maximizing the chances of conversion, which you can effortlessly achieve by linking them to fullscreen sharing. Take the opportunity to strike big and immerse shoppers by showcasing products in a single or multi-page format, adding custom colors, fonts, and backgrounds, or disabling sharing options for the ultimate control over your retail marketing assets.
3. Digital Newsletter (Holiday Edition)
The holiday season is when shoppers become opportunistic as they’re keeping a close eye on their inboxes to seize every discount code put out by their favorite retailers. You can easily take advantage of this opportunity to keep your customers engaged with your brand, stay top-of-mind, and attract new shoppers with a holiday-special digital newsletter. You can even sell products directly through your newsletter with shoppable links to compel readers to become buyers.
4. Digital Lookbook
Amplify the season's joy with inspiring digital lookbooks that are not only stunning visual representations of state-of-the-art outfits but also incredibly effective selling tools. There are a billion reasons why a digital lookbook can be the golden ticket to generating higher sales this year’s holiday season. Still, these should be enough to convince you:
Stunning visuals make upselling and product bundling easier.
Shoppers are more likely to purchase products they can interact with (hint: links and videos).
Lookbooks engage consumers with a compelling narrative they can buy into.
Underperforming products can be mixed with new releases for a clever refresh.
5. Digital Photo Album
Give readers an endless list of products and you’ll bore them to no end. But offer them something meaningful like a digital photo album, and you’ll convert them into customers in the blink of an eye. Easily incorporate product photos onto your website and bring them to life with links and videos. And just like that, you can forget about static images no one wants to sit around and look at; by creating a unique digital album, shoppers can enjoy an immersive experience flipping through it, which ultimately brings them closer to the shopping cart.
6. Social Media Marketing
It’s imperative to be right where your audience can be found. And, a strong social media presence makes room for more visibility, traffic, and, most importantly, sales. Social channels are key to putting your holiday marketing strategy in motion as shoppers take time to scroll around in hopes of finding the gifts of their dreams. Whether you’re short of ideas or feel inspired to create, our Social Posts feature is the go-to for transforming content into powerful bite-sized marketing assets.
7. Video Marketing
Leave no stone unturned when it comes to your strategy and be sure to utilize the power of the king of content – video. Not only is this form of content highly dynamic and easy to consume, but it’s also the ideal medium for storytelling. And, as we all know, stories sell. Video marketing has increased in popularity in recent years, and the reason why is unmistakable: consumers want to be entertained and informed in as little time as possible, with zero effort on their side. If you want to pull shoppers into the perfect holiday story where buying your products is the happy ending, bringing your retail catalog to life with videos is the way to go.
Important Tips for Holiday Retail Marketing
With the right retail marketing tips and tactics, retailers and wholesalers can leverage the holiday season to gain trust and credibility with their customers and ultimately increase sales. Some holiday campaigns have become iconic – such as the Coca-Cola Christmas truck or Starbucks’ red cups – and there’s no shortage of consumers who can’t hold in their excitement when brands announce the start of the holiday season through their marketing campaigns. Besides telling a magical story with an interactive digital catalog and engaging shoppers on social channels with powerful marketing collateral, here are a few more tips to remember:
Take a look at what worked in last year’s marketing campaign and make it better.
Keep shoppers’ emotions in mind at all times.
Put your creativity in motion and be original with your content.
When you create content, think about how it will benefit customers and their experience.
Looking for more ideas to grow your brand? Check out our dedicated retail page for more tips on creating, publishing, and successfully promoting your marketing assets.