Listen to this blog
Written by AJ Leale, Sr. Director eCommerce
The Q4 period is tightly packed with opportunities for drastically increasing the revenue. It is the season of gifting and every retailer does everything in their power to make the customers pick their stores for holiday shopping.
The competition gets rampant – and exceptional content may help with driving the customers your way.
With that in mind, we have compiled this list of tips to help you create the best holiday content ever – and how to create a spotless holiday content strategy for 2019.
Check your current standing
The first step is to examine the current content and see if it still provides value for the customers.
Evaluate the pages that gathered the highest clicks, lowest bounces, assess if they are still working, mimic if possible with new content. Also, see what needs to be deleted, what needs an update and modifications to fit the date, and what can be repurposed. This way, you will improve the existing content so it doesn’t go to waste – it is better to keep the pages with good SEO than to redirect them!
Next, check the loading speed, SERP and how you rank for the important keywords. Re-evaluate the keywords used, maybe new ones convert better.
If your pages don’t show up on the first page, it is time to do some work on your product pages and blogs:
- freshen up the old ones
- create new ones according to the SEO audit
Quick eCommerce Website Speed Checklist
One of your main tasks is to make sure your online store is as fast and user-friendly as possible since you will be experiencing a traffic increase from holiday shoppers.
This is what you can do to stop the content from slowing the website down:
- Decrease the image size (tinypng.com) by optimizing the size while keeping the quality
- Leverage CSS sprites
- Minimize the code – Gzip can help with file compression
- Reduce the number of redirects
- Put the browser caching to use
These are only the basics – here we covered all the ways to improve the website speed in depth.
Review the last holiday season – what can you learn?
It is time to pull out the last years’ notes and see how it went.
Your previous experience with holiday content will determine the new strategy: implement the things that worked well, but remember to adjust them to fit the time and new context.
Additionally, recall the tactics that let you down in the worst moment possible.
Was it the lack of staff? Crashing website? Outdated info in your blogs pointed out in snarky comments?
Make sure it doesn’t happen again and learn from your past struggles.
Trend forecasting for 2020 – how to find out what people want?
The best answer is often the easiest one – ask them!
Your customers will be happy to reveal what they want. All you need to do is listen and note it down – even a simple survey could help a lot.
Apart from customer research, look into the newest trends and try to predict what will go well. More often than not, a brand that dares to do something different when everyone gets sick of the long-standing trends, sets the new one in place and achieves amazing results.
Content planning
Photos, blogs, videos, surveys, quizzes, etc – the content you want to publish should be planned and created in advance. This way, you will avoid any unpleasant surprises and deadline fatigue, in addition to holiday stress.
Set your goals and act on them
The content you plan to create should be aligned to the business goals you set.
For most marketers, that would be increasing the revenue. It doesn’t have to be that limited – this time of year is a great opportunity to raise brand awareness and improve the image, nurture the relationship with the existing customer base, or simply increase the traffic.
Keep the audiences’ points of interest in mind, though.
At the intersection of their passions and your business priorities lies the perfect content.
Multi-channel approach
Utilize every channel possible and profitable to distribute the holiday content you have prepared:
- Youtube
- Blog
For each of these channels, you need to create a different strategy and content.
Luckily, amazing pictures and videos can be filmed, edited and published with smartphones only, but you still need to come up with something compelling, useful and unique.
Schedule ahead of time
Planning and creating the content in advance will help you stay organized and prevent the crisis that is frequent during the holidays. Some of the tools for scheduling social media posts are as follows:
- Hootsuite
- SproutSocial
- Buffer (free!)
- SocialReport
- SocialBakers
Test, monitor, and analyze
Leave a gift for the future You, from the present Self – and keep track of everything you have done during the holiday season. When it is time to deliver a good content strategy next year – you will know what needs to be improved without digging into the multiple corners of the cloud service or your website.
Conclusion
Timely content strategy and implementation help with achieving the best results with content-driven eCommerce. It is important to increase the speed and relieve the websites of unnecessary weight before the holiday shopping starts, and maintain a positive brand image by delivering useful information to the customers.
Need some expert help with creating a bespoke content strategy for your eCommerce? Contact us and secure the top positions for the upcoming season!