We Need To Talk About Marketing For Christmas 2020

It’s August, we’re in the midst of a heatwave, in Manchester we’re still under stricter lockdown conditions, the COVID-19 pandemic is still very much with us, and right now you would think Christmas would be the last thing on people’s minds, and that is the problem. Do you know what marketing costs the most in terms of return on investment? Knee-jerk, last-minute, poorly thought out campaigns which businesses throw money at and hope they will provide a return. Irrespective of marketing channel, whether it’s SEO, Social Media, PPC, Website Design, some forward-thinking will go a long way into getting the best return out of the budget you have available.

E-commerce will be more important than ever this year as people’s shopping habits change as a result of the pandemic. More people than ever will be buying online instead of heading to the shops and it’s time to ask the question, how will your business capitalise from that change? How we can we help you get your business in front of the right people? Let’s have a look at some key points for each of the channels.

SEO

• Long term strategy which requires time to become effective.
• Start now and by Christmas, you should see some solid results.
• SEO drives your keywords up the organic rankings.
• Organic results account for around 70% of all clicks from a search results page.
• Organic SEO strategies typically have a much higher conversion rate than any other marketing channel.

PPC

• Results can come almost instantly for any business including e-commerce.
• Despite that, PPC campaigns need to have continuous optimisation to prevent budget waste and low ROI scores.
• Starting the PPC process now will mean that by Christmas, your campaigns will have laser targeted focus and be able to drive a much better return on investment.
• PPC Ads account for around 20% of the clicks from a search results page, but with billions of searches every single day, the audience is still very sizeable and don’t let your competitors steal it!
• With changes reflected instantly, you can quickly add or remove focus areas from campaigns and tweak existing ones to get the best results.

Social Media

• Perfect for engaging new customers who fall into a very specific audience that you know your brand or products will resonate with.
• Allows your business to engage with existing audience through both organic and paid campaigns.
• Multiple campaign goals can include driving traffic to your website, increasing audience size through likes/followers, brand awareness, and sales.
• 3.5billion people are active on at least one social media platform.
• Social Media Advertising allows, by far, the most granular audience targeting compared to both PPC and SEO. This allows campaigns to be very focused, and designed for the exact audience you are working to get in front of.

Website Design

• 94% of first impressions for a business come from a visitor landing on your website. If your website is outdated, difficult to use and not designed in a user-friendly way, 89% of those visitors will shop with a competitor in the future.
• 74% of website visitors are likely to return to a website with a mobile-friendly design. (Even in 2020, websites not designed for mobiles do still exist).
• Billions of pounds in revenue are estimated to be lost every year because of slow loading websites. This only accounts for visitors who don’t buy once on the website because of slow loading, it doesn’t include the impact a slow website can have on rankings or your Google Ads Quality Score.
• Do you understand your customer journey? Have you identified common drop off points on your website? Is the journey from product search through to checkout simple and easy to understand? User experience / CRO is the most important part of website design.
• Is Your website still fit for purpose? The average lifespan of a website is around 2-2.5 years. When was the last time you invested in a design update to reflect your current branding and what your customers are looking for?

We could give you so many more statistics and facts around marketing and web design but the core point for this content piece remains the same; now is the time to be prepping, testing, working on your website, all in preparation for the Christmas rush, which we anticipate is going to be bigger than ever before as people shun traditional shopping for the online experience.

Is your business ready for Christmas 2020? In short, you should be starting SEO literally as soon as you can, any later and it’ll be too late. Social Media & PPC should be started as soon as possible also to allow time to refine audience targeting and campaign focus areas to ensure you’re best placed to maximise return on investment from your budget.

Not sure which channel to target? Need help to maximise the benefits of marketing? We’re on hand to help. Get in touch and we can advise based on your specific business goals.