Top Tips for Last Minute Christmas Promotions

With Christmas on the doorstep, planning for events is a subject that many website owners need to think about, but several months beforehand.

Magazines have their Christmases in the summer because of the lead times they need to get features written and the magazines published. However, many website owners don’t always prepare themselves well in advance for seasonal events. Let’s face it; the last thing you want to think about in the summer is Christmas!

However, with online marketing, all is not lost and there are many last minute things you can do to get those shoppers to your website over the next few weeks.

Pay per Click Advertising
If you’re website isn’t doing particularly well for your target keywords in the natural rankings and you want Christmas shoppers coming to your website over the next few weeks, you’ve left it too late to optimise your site. However, pay per click advertising (PPC) will bring visitors to your site more or less instantly, the only downside being that you’ll need to pay for each of those visitors to come to your site. If you want to set up a last minute pay per click campaign with either of the main pay per click providers, i.e Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing or Microsoft AdCenter, read our series of articles we wrote over the summer on PPC and how to set up a campaign. If you want to stretch your budget, make sure your ads are on the search and content networks of Google Adwords & Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Email Marketing
If you’re selling products over the net, then hopefully you’ve been busy building up your list of customers and prospects. This time of year is a great time to really make the most of the hard work you’ve done building your list, so make sure you send out some great offers to your list to get them shopping on your site, and not your competitors' websites. Try and resist the temptation to buy in lists if your database isn’t very big – those people on the list will wonder how you got hold of their details and may object to the ‘spam’ you’re sending them!

Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking sites are hugely popular, and where people can share websites they like with others and tag them with appropriate words. It’s probably worth investigating these sites and bookmarking your own to start with, amongst others you find. We can’t tell you how quickly you’ll get your bookmarks found on these sites, but they can drive significant amounts of traffic to websites. The main ones to try are:
del.icio.us
StumbleUpon
Ma.gnolia
Digg
Reddit
Digg & Reddit focus more on news and articles that are popular, so if you post on these sites, make sure your article is newsworthy and interesting to others.

Participation
If you really want to widen your audience and have time on your hands, then you can always try posting on forums relating to your products, blogs and some social networking. You need to be careful and not blatantly advertise which you’ll find will be a turn off on these social sites and you could find yourself isolated. As long as you contribute genuinely useful information or post useful comments, then why not give it a whirl!

We probably should have tackled this subject a few months ago, so look out for a more comprehensive article on planning for events in a future edition of Marketing Karma!