AMA Recap | Holiday Marketing for Your Shopify Store! with 2H Media

[Jacqui]

A big shout out to all of the merchants who participated in our AMA with 2H Media: Holiday Marketing for Your Shopify Store! The team at 2H Media Marketing Agency, @MatthewHerchel and @AronMurch, really enjoyed engaging with you and helping you prepare for the upcoming holidays. A big change this time was that the AMA was streamed on 2H Media’s Twitch channel. The stream recording can be watched on YouTube.

Holiday Marketing in an Annual Strategy

During the AMA, we noticed a promising trend: many of the participating merchants wanted to optimize how their holiday marketing efforts should fit into their annual marketing strategy. This long-term view is critical for success in holiday marketing, as many of the most effective tactics take serious time to plan and implement.

Here are some great Q&As about how holiday marketing fits into a larger strategy:

Question From @jadamc: 

How far in advance should I be planning for holiday marketing? Should all my marketing for the year build to the "holidays" in November December? Does the classic "free" marketing suggestions (SEO, blogs, posting on socials) actually help for the holidays?

Answer From 2H Media:

Hi Jac,

There're a couple of good questions in there:

• How far in advance should you plan your holiday marketing? This should be part of your overall marketing strategy. We'd recommend starting your planning at the beginning of the year and scheduling out when you need to hit specific milestones for each of your marketing efforts. You should generally develop your holiday marketing during the summer at the latest.

• Should all your marketing for the year build to the holidays in November/December? It depends; If 90% of your sales come through the holidays then they should get 90% of your attention. Otherwise, ramping up a few months early is likely appropriate.

• Do the classic "free" marketing suggestions actually help for the holidays? Yes, but with a huge asterisk. SEO helps if you have a large body of evergreen content that has been indexed by search engines. Blogs work if you're able to get your content featured on sites that have a ton of traffic. Socials work if you have a large and passionate following. In all 3 cases, those are big ifs. Ultimately, these "free" methods can work but tend to be complicated and surprisingly expensive.

As a general rule, most companies will benefit from aggressive marketing during the less competitive times of year, combined with a strong push to collect email sign-ups. Then, you can ramp up marketing to your own channels through email as the holidays draw closer.

Question From @Shunter42:

When it comes to seasonal SEO strategies, should you update your current listings to add keywords such as "gift for mother", "gift for aunt", "gift for grandmother" etc... I see many people do this and wonder if it's effective, and if so, why?

Answer From 2H Media:

Good question.

I can't imagine this strategy is effective if you're not using those keywords year round and have a history of building gift giving guides. SEO is a long-term play so on the fly strategies aren't likely to be effective.

If you're really thinking forward, there is an argument to be made for starting to use gift related keywords and content on your website, with the goal of attracting organic search traffic next year and the year after.

Marketing for Specific Niche Products

In addition to questions about annual marketing, we also saw some great questions about assessing audiences and choosing the right marketing strategy.

Here are some Q&As that focus on marketing for specific niches:

Question From @TSM_CO:

I always love these AMAs!

What kind of marketing makes sense for a digital product for the holidays? I sell ebooks (self help) which aren't always something people would buy for others. Would I still frame it as something to buy others or maybe as a gift to yourself? 

Budget wise is it worth it to hop on the Facebook ads train for holidays? Their ads always feel like a money sink rather than anything that would pay off. 

Thanks!

Answer From 2H Media:

Good question! Thanks for joining us again. 🙂

I'd challenge the idea that self help books aren't purchased as gifts. I've seen lots of examples anecdotally of people buying loved ones self help books in times of challenge, or more general self improvement books in preparation for growth, such as in new business. Ultimately, however, if your product is more personal and really unlikely to be purchased for someone else, I think there are a few options. There's an argument to be made for "adding the book to your holiday wish list" - a lot of times, people are encouraged not to shop for themselves around the holidays because others are looking for gift opportunities. You could also run a buy one get one sale so that they can purchase the book for themself and have a copy to gift.

Regarding ads, it's pretty tricky to say. We usually start by trying to determine the best ads platform for any given product. Facebook is great for acquiring new customers that aren't aware that they might want your product. Google ads are great for targeting customers that are already looking for something similar. Either way, what we typically recommend for small businesses is ramping up your ad spend early and then decreasing spending as the holiday draws closer and competition increases in the advertising space.

Hope that helps!

Question From @VIB1:

I have a local gift box company where sales are very seasonal and peak during Christmas. Most customers are purchasing as a gift for someone else. With rising shipping costs I'd like to pivot toward doing more of the larger, corporate orders (companies buying holiday gifts for their clients, brokers, employees etc) . Any advice for targeting the people in charge of making these decisions (executive assistants, office managers, founders, etc). It feels too narrow of an audience for facebook/adwords targeting, but I could be wrong!

Answer From 2H Media:

Hi VIB1,

This is a really interesting question. Targeting that business focused audience seems like a smart move.

We have a couple of thoughts:

• From a digital marketing perspective, we would be looking to LinkedIn. As a business focused platform, this is one of the best places online to advertise to people in specific roles. One of the best ways to start out is connecting with all of the executive assistants within a 50 mile radius and starting to build relationships. There are also advertising options in LinkedIn where you can run ads for specific job roles.

• From a more traditional perspective, don't overlook in-person networking. We've had a lot of luck building relationships with decision makers through walking the floor at trade shows.

Broadly speaking, the thing to keep in mind with a b2b audience making larger purchases is that you will have a slower sales cycle that is built on relationships. If you can position yourself as a timesaver and bridge to local gift products, I can see this really paying off but it may take several touch-points before it's effective.

Wrapping Up

Thanks again to all who joined us live for our third AMA with 2H Media. You can find all questions and answers from the event in the 2H Media AMA thread. 

Want more from 2H Media? Check out their YouTube channel for a library of educational content or visit their marketing services website and reach out to them directly.

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