If you’re looking forward to the holiday season, then you know just how lucrative holiday shopping can be. When you market your products to your target market using gift guides, you give them a hassle-free way to find exactly what they’re looking for. You may be surprised to find that many consumers are actually looking for guidance exactly like this.

During Christmas, people go all-out to find the best gifts for their loved ones. Holiday shopping deals are a huge favorite among consumers, and they play a significant role in improving customer engagement and loyalty.

Most people turn to online shopping when they look for Christmas deals, New Year’s shopping deals, Valentine’s Day deals, and more. It helps people find a curated list of everything they could possibly need – all in one place.

Customers were asked how they would shop during the holidays, and nearly 59% said that they would prefer online shopping, while 36% said they intended to visit stores. Some of these shoppers also combine online shopping with retail shopping.

In 2020, online shopping is set to be the more popular option. And this means you need a strong online marketing campaign to create awareness about your products and boost sales. A gift guide is a powerful online marketing tool that can easily convert a reader into a buyer within minutes.

Shoppers typically don’t invest the same amount of thought and insight into every gift they buy. While they may pay more attention to what they get their near and dear ones, acquaintances and colleagues get more standard gifts. However, this doesn’t mean that they want to appear as if they haven’t put any thought into their gift.

This is where a gift guide can help. In the gift guide, you highlight your preferred products and include what makes them great gifts. Someone who doesn’t know what gift to purchase can find the guide through social media or a Google search. If your content marketing is convincing enough, you’re very likely to get a new customer from the process.

People look for all kinds of gift guides online – from wedding gift ideas to birthday gift ideas. Your gift guides can expand beyond seasonal marketing and become a regular part of your digital marketing strategy.

Pros:

• Increases brand and product awareness.

• Increases reach to a larger target market.
• More customers are expected to spend online, so focusing on online gift guide marketing is more profitable.

Cons:

• Need to create multiple gift guides.
• Is a constantly updating content marketing strategy where you need to create new gift guides as new products arrive.

Even if you create a great gift guide, you need to make sure that it reaches people as well. You shouldn’t expect people to visit your website, find your gift guide, and then read it. You need to actively take your gift guides to your target market. This is where a comprehensive online marketing strategy should help you. Your strategy should include:

• Social Media: Gift Guides are great shareable content, especially around any gift-giving season. It’s a good way for consumers to recommend products to friends and family, and for brands to highlight their bestselling products.
• Email Marketing: Add your holiday or seasonal gift guide to your emailers and newsletters when you send them out. If you segment your recipient list and send them customized gift guides, your conversions could increase more. This also increases customer engagement and loyalty.
• Mailing List: If you use a mailing list, then send out a physical copy of your gift guide to all your customers. Include the season’s bestsellers, and highlight any special deals or offers.
  Your gift guides should always be free. That’s why an online gift guide is an inexpensive way to increase customer awareness about your products. A few physical copies are okay, but focus your gift guide campaign on online marketing.

Pros:

• Inexpensive yet effective.

• Increase customer base and develop brand loyalty.

Cons:

• Need to be consistent on social media.
• Gift guides tend to become irrelevant when the season passes. Then you’ll need to make a new set.

There are two primary categories of shoppers you need to target with your online marketing campaign. The first of these is the early bird shopper. These shoppers start early and plan ahead.

In the week between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, people spent $28.5 billion on purchases in the United States. Most of this came from Early Bird Shoppers. They spend more money and often want to find only the best gifts.

Here is where a specialized gift guide can make all the difference. Some examples of these include ‘gift guides for bosses’, ‘gift ideas for colleagues’ or ‘best gift for him/her’.

Almost 60% of shoppers start their Christmas shopping before November ends. This means that you should constantly be rolling out gift guides during this time, ideally a few every month.

Last-minute shoppers, on the other hand, wait until the Christmas is just around the corner to purchase. They may be waiting for the best deals or trying to find the perfect gift. You can solve both these problems by gifting them a free online resource that points out the bestselling products from your brand.

Create gift guides for different price ranges, early shopping deals, late shopping deals, and more.

Pros:

• Opportunity to showcase new and old products.
• Hype up deals and discounts to increase conversions.

Cons:

• Limit customer choice by selecting curated products.
• Sales of other products may not be at par with listed products.

Mobile searches for gift guides start early. For the Christmas shopping season, the search begins right after Black Friday. It goes on till the week just before Christmas. Similar narratives exist for other seasonal events as well. Lunar New Year, Valentine’s Day, New Year’s shopping, these holidays all lead to an increased search for ‘gift ideas’ or ‘gift guides’ in the weeks leading up to the celebration.

Pros:

• Target market with specialized gift guides.
• Boost sales during seasonal holidays.

Cons:

• Limit target market to only those celebrating the seasonal holiday.

The year is about to end and the holiday season is just around the corner. Every year, the period between Thanksgiving and New Year’s brings in huge profits for businesses across the globe. But how do you catch the customer’s attention at a time when every other business is trying to? The answer is through digital marketing and using the right marketing strategies. New Year’s shopping is a celebration where people get ready to say goodbye to the present year, and bring in the next one. For most people, this is done in style, and that means sales for businesses.

Stay ahead of your competition by learning about consumer shopping habits. Develop exclusive New Year’s shopping deals and online marketing strategies that will bring all the customers to you!

Research on consumer shopping trends in recent years show that almost 63% of shoppers start their journeys online. This means that most of your customers are likely to prefer e-commerce portals over retail shops, at least while they’re browsing. Turning to e-commerce portals to make sales will give retail businesses a huge opportunity to make profits. The number of people using the internet to shop is roughly over 2 billion now. With access to worldwide shipping and willing consumers from across the world, now is the time for businesses to go online.

You can expect large numbers of local as well as international customers around New Year’s – especially if you’re actively digital marketing your products using social media.

There’s no turning back from the fact that social media now occupies a powerful position in dictating consumer interests. But this also provides businesses with unique digital marketing opportunities. Through various social media platforms, you can actively encourage people to buy from you. Special year-end discounts and deals that are advertised using a digital marketing campaign can be a great boon to your business.

It’s also an affordable and easy way to reach large groups of people. Consumers regularly interact with popular hashtags. Add relevant hashtags like #newyears, #newyearsdeals and #newyearshopping to your posts to be able to target the right customers. Facebook lets you customize your target audience, so your content only reaches people within a limited area. You can use this to hone in on retail clients.

Remember that consumers will search through social media for content as well. So New Year’s themed content and visuals that generate engagement will be useful online marketing for your brand. The consumers sharing your content creates brand awareness, and this increases the likelihood of more people buying your products.

Not only are people starting their New Year’s Eve shopping online more often, they also use a specific search engine more than others. 35% of all product searches start with a Google search, and this is good news for your business. Ranking high in the Google search results, meaning appearing within the first few pages where consumers are more likely to visit your website, is doable. All you need is Search Engine Optimization. An expert can do this for you if you are unable to do it. SEO is when brands utilize certain keywords like ‘new years shopping’, ‘new years shopping deals’ or ‘new years eve shopping’. This is done so that the Google search engine algorithm leads people searching for those terms to the brand’s website by ranking the brand higher in the search listings.

Before New Year’s, the number of people searching for topics like ‘new year’s shopping deals’, ‘new year’s shopping discounts’, and ‘new year’s shopping free shopping’ go up by a large amount. If these keywords are SEO integrated into your website, your web traffic is more likely to increase.

Especially after Christmas, more people look for free shipping when purchasing products online. This isn’t unusual during off-season either, as 63% of the times, high shipping costs lead to people abandoning their shopping carts. But during New Year’s, this gains new importance as people are not willing to spend on free shipping. That’s why searches for ‘new years free shipping’ also increases during this time.

A surprising New Year’s search habit you can include in your digital marketing strategies is the use of ratings and reviews. Data shows that 53% of shoppers think that ratings and reviews are important when purchasing a product. If your website doesn’t have a system to use these, include them ASAP. The more a customer sees other people liking and enjoying your products, the more likely they are to purchase from you.

Around the New Year’s, people prefer to purchase products that lead to self-improvement, help them celebrate with others, and create plans around the New Year.

Over the past two years, 49.2% of all sales were made through mobiles, and this trend is only set to increase in 2021 (Statista). Use these insights to launch your digital marketing campaign and net huge profits this New Year’s!

Instagram filters are one of the most popular features on social media. Currently, there are 500 million, and growing, active users on Instagram, most of whom are millennials. According to statistical data, one-third of these users use the online medium to buy something or the other. Here is another data – videos, on Instagram, lead engagements by at least 21.2% in comparison to stills or carousels.

Digital marketing experts such as Neil Patel suggests, businesses must leverage a new feature as soon as it launches. Instagram AR filters are currently the goose that lays the golden eggs, and this has been proven to be a successful feature. A good example was McDonald’s Christmas marketing campaign, where they created an Instagram Christmas AR filter to engage with their target audience, not only was this feature fascinating to look at, but it was also fun to interact with. Back in the day, when the competition was comparatively low, brands could still bide their time in regard to a digital campaign. Today, a business must pounce upon a new enhancement as soon as it launches before it blows up and becomes noisy. Businesses must make a mark before the noise hits!

Many brands have already created cool Instagram filters that users can find and download from the Effects Gallery. It goes without saying that this is one of the most effective marketing strategies as far as digital advertising is concerned. When a netizen uses a filter created by your brand, axiomatically, your brand name pops up on his/her story/feed, which is how you acquire visibility.

But hold on, now there is an even better way!

Imagine you have your own clothing line. Now, if you want to take full advantage of your digital presence, what would you do other than creating an appealing catalog of clothes? Write good product descriptions? Have them displayed on models?

Your customers are regular people with different body types. And we would all agree that nothing beats trying out an outfit yourself. Using these new AR Instagram filter, you can create augmented reality, which would allow a visitor on your page to try out the outfit herself/himself, enhancing customer experience dramatically.

This is just one basic example. However, any business can fit its offerings or products to unique filters that bring the customer in. You can even fit seasonal advertising ideas to exclusive and cool filters, such as a Halloween-themed make up range or accessories. See, there could be a plethora of ideas.

IKEA is one of the most favored companies in the world because it aims to enhance customer experience before anything else.

Open an account on Spark AR Studio to get started. Choose an effect. You can upload a 3D asset, after which you may customize the movements of the graphic. Test and publish. The AR filters appear right beside the ‘Series’ icon denoted as a ‘smiley’. Your followers can click on the ‘smiley’ to check out the filters and use them – that’s creating brand awareness 101! If you are not sure about creating your own filters, delegate the task to an expert Instagram filter creator. What more, this tool is free! So, you get a potential outreach for your brand without spending any money.

Instagram/KOL is a great strategy to enhance your marketing game. If you can get Instagram influencers to try out your filters and share those with their followers, the ball is in your court! You’ve won half the battle.

Make the most of the tool that allows you to create virtual realities with your products. Connect with your customers at an immediate level. Promote them on Instagram because, with these, you can build engagements in real-time as opposed to just garnering likes. Use AR filters to be visible for a reason.