Digital Lab

It’s a time when clients are away on holiday, employees use up banked days off and your customer base moves away to other holiday activities. Your website is also going to see a drop in traffic as well but you can’t just walk away from your business during this time of year.

So what should you do to maintain your online presence during this hectic season? Here are our 5 best ho-ho-holiday marketing tips for your small business.

1. Don’t Stop Curating Content
Content curation is an interesting thing. As the holidays approach there may not be as much content to go through in the first place as everyone else gears down for the end of the year. However, that doesn’t mean you should stop doing it yourself. Although your website visitor numbers will take a dip over the holidays, regular visitors will come back and they will be looking for new content to read. That is why you don’t stop curating content.

2. Reducing Post Numbers Is Okay
There is nothing wrong with not posting as much over the holidays as you would normally do during a normal workweek. As noted above, there may not be a lot of fresh material to choose from anyway and with your regular visitors distracted with holiday activities, reducing your posting frequency may not be noticed. Plus, you need a bit of a break, too. After all, it is the holiday season and you need time for other activities as well.

3. Never Eliminate Original Content
Even though you will be reducing the number of posts published during the holidays, and that there will be a shortage of curated material to use, this is a perfect set of reasons to keep using original content. Even if you reduce your overall original content totals by 50% over the holiday season, you will still be publishing something and it will be original content. A ‘Year In Review” post is always a good idea as well as holiday-themed articles.

4. Change Your Publication Schedule
You can fine-tune this by looking over your website analytics. The publication schedule change you would be making would focus more on the time of day you publish as opposed to the number of days you publish. So, as an example, if your analytics point to higher traffic to your website in the morning, you’ll want to publish something early in the morning. That would be the best time to publish your original content and then use curated content for the rest of the day.

5. Stay Engaged Even During Holidays
If your small business marketing department gets reduced during the holiday and you are faced with choosing between content publishing and customer engagement via social media, the latter has to stay. As social media develops relationships and connections you can’t let that engagement drop. This means you will be responding to comments and customer service matters and those actions will serve your business better in the holiday season than content.

In Conclusion
Just because of non-retailers either shutting down their operations or reducing staff during the holiday season you can’t assume that your customers and clients expect that. Plus, once holidays are over, you still want to have those loyal customers coming back for your services. One way to do that over a holiday is to maintain your online presence. It shows that someone is still representing the business and reaching out to their customers.

The tips above are meant to inspire you on applying simple principles to your holiday operations. Not every small business is equipped to keep engaged with those who visit their website. However, if your business accomplishes this, it will give you a competitive edge over the others once the holidays have passed and the New Year is in full swing. Keeping your company accessible during a holiday break is challenging but with the right tools, it is possible.