Autumn is a great time of year to have a breather after a busy summer. If your business peaks in the tourist season, you’ll be glad to have the rest!
While it’s important to take a break, while things are slower this is also the perfect time to focus on your marketing and making plans for the next busy period.
It might feel too early to be talking about Christmas, but for business owners it’s time to get your festive campaigns, offers and services in motion.
We’ll touch on four areas you can focus on now that will pay off later in the year.
Update your website
If things are slow, this is the ideal time to make sure your website is up-to-date. Spend some time carefully checking through it and updating content where needed. Look out for:
Outdated references, events or information
Opening dates and times
Promotions or offers that are no longer valid
Imagery or copy that needs a refresh
Missing products
If you’re happy with what’s there, it’s a good opportunity to focus on growing your site. Perhaps now is the time to get the blog up and running, or reviewing and improving your SEO (which is up next!)
Improve your SEO
SEO takes time to work, and putting in the time and effort now will pay off when it comes to festive season sales.
Do a quick SEO audit to give you a roadmap for what to focus on. This could be as simple as googling your main keywords to check how visible your website is, and noting down what might be missing on your page/pages.
A few simple activities you can do include:
Additional keyword research to find relevant search terms you can include on your key pages
Review and update your H1 and H2 headings
Update your meta titles and descriptions to include keywords
Break up long chunks of text with headings and lists
Reduce the size of large images to improve load speed
Add alt text to your images
Update your Google Business Profile
These are just a few examples. We have another blog post dedicated to the fundamentals of good on-page SEO if you want more help and ideas.
Brainstorm promotional campaigns
Get the creative juices flowing and think about how you can promote your products or services in the run up to the festive period.
Start by pinning down which products you want to focus on. These could be areas that maybe aren’t your biggest sellers, to give them a boost – or products that are relevant and sell well at this time of year.
Next, map out who your target audience is for these products. What do they like, want and respond to? This will help to shape your messaging and how to market to them.
Once you have these areas nailed down, it’s time to shape the kind of content you might need. This could be a series of emails, new photography, videos, social posts, ads or web content.
Plan content in advance
Creating email and social media content in batches will save you a lot of time later down the line. Spending even just a couple of hours jotting down ideas, writing captions and sourcing imagery can make a big difference.
You can use scheduling tools (we use Planable) to manage your social media accounts from one place, and schedule posts in advance. Then you can focus on the other areas of your business while your posts get published for you.
Tools like Mailchimp help you plan out your email campaigns too. Having these mapped out is important because then you can target the right people at the right time, instead of rushing at the last minute.
Need further help?
These are just a few simple ideas you can use to apply to your Christmas marketing and prepare for the busy festive season.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed about where to start, keep things simple and remember that ‘done is better than perfect.’ Being consistent with your marketing is far more valuable than waiting until you have a genius campaign idea to get started.
We help lots of local businesses just like you with their digital marketing, so please do get in touch if you need extra support.
Contact us here: https://www.northbound-digital.co.uk/contact
