While there are many incredibly useful tools your business can use to make the most of the holiday shopping season, it’s hard to beat a well-crafted holiday shopping guide. After all, this time of year can get incredibly hectic for even the most level-headed shoppers. A little extra help and inspiration is something people can appreciate.
Visual content like shopping guides are easier to consumer than text-based content (like blog posts), and they allow your customers to quickly discover and share your products. If you’re tight on resources and time, or just don’t know where to begin, check out these 6 tips below:
1. Simplify the theme.
While it might be tempting to simply include all of your top-selling products, your customers are going to be more likely to find your guide helpful if it follows a specific theme. That said, decide what you’d like to promote and how. Consider a dedicated guide focused on “gifts for him”, gifts for busy moms, gifts under a certain price point, or gifts that resonate with a specific niche hobby or profession. You’ll also want to make sure you organize your guide into smaller categories to help your customer find exactly what they’re looking for quickly and easily.
2. Choose a few specific items to highlight.
As touched on above, a gift guide should make the process of finding exactly the right item simpler and easier. That said, only highlight a few items – a minimum of three, but no more than seven. For best results, choose best sellers or hot new releases, especially those that tend to be popular with the specific demographic you’re trying to reach. Remember, you can always create and send more than one guide!
3. Include plenty of images.
When shopping online, you can’t enjoy the experience of holding an item in your hands to see if it’s really as soft as it looks or trying it on to see if it flatters your figure. Images are key when it comes to convincing shoppers your products are exactly what they’re looking for.
Make sure you have plenty of good quality, high resolution images of the products you’ll be including in your guide. Choose options that actually show the product in use or connect it to the type of lifestyle it’s meant to complement. The clearer a picture you can paint in the person’s mind as far as what it will be like to use this item, the better
4. Email your guide, but host it on your website.
Once you finally do decide the time is right to release your guide into the world, make sure you publish it in such a way that it’s easy to find and access. A special landing page (like this one from Rifle Paper Co.) that can be reached via a full color banner ad on your front page is just one really good suggestion. Then promote it and alert your existing customers to its presence via email.
You’ll also want to pour some effort into announcing the guide via social media. Pinterest is an especially good place to do so, but Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are important because of the sheer number of people that use those sites. Dedicated blog entries that mention the guide and/or the items in it are a good idea as well.
5. Make marketing your guide an ongoing process.
Don’t simply launch your guide and expect it to deliver results on its own. Have a strategy in place as far as how you plan to promote it throughout the holiday season. It’s important to be organized, as well as consistent. Creativity is even more important.
Don’t simply make a single social media post inviting people to check out your guide via a link. Select images of choice items from the guide and post them along with links and enticing descriptions over a number of days or weeks. For best results, set a schedule and stick to it.
6. Make it as easy as possible for interested buyers to finalize purchases.
Should a given viewer decide they’re ready to buy an item, it’s important that it be as easy as possible for them to do so. Double and triple check all links from your guide to ensure they actually take customers to the correct pages, as well as guide them through the checkout process quickly. Your customers will thank you for it!
Need more holiday marketing tips and inspiration? Check out the rest of our guides here!
