Five Digital Marketing Trends That Will Dominate This Holiday Season

If you’re set to launch your holiday marketing campaign, you’ll want to know about the key holiday digital marketing trends to tap into.

There are some significant trends anticipated for 2019, and some have already been tested in 2018. For example, an episode of the U.S. show Black-ish featured a character talking about a Procter & Gamble ad campaign that was running. This could soon be the future of TV.

Small businesses don’t have the resources to advertise the way multinationals do, but you can certainly watch what they do and find takeaways in their approaches to holiday digital marketing trends.

Product Placement in Real Time

Businesses must be smart when it comes to working around the Millennial anti-advertising generation, and product placement does just that. Netflix and Amazon in particular had mastered the strategy, with notable shows such as House of Cards featuring brands — remember the Playstation Game Console, Frank Underwood’s favourite pastime?

You can’t work on that scale, but you can definitely use Instagram TV (IGTV), Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook as platforms for your mini-features and leverage your products or services in a story-telling format.

However, the big difference between YouTube and IGTV is that IGTV (and Snapchat) enables videos for vertical smartphones. They are vertical and full-screen. Why is this so important? The majority of mobile consumption is vertical. With square or the traditional horizontal video format, only a few people will turn their phone to watch your content.

To leverage IGTV, take a look at what Forbes has to say on making your IGTV channel look great.

At TechWyse, we can work with you to create bold marketing stories worthy of any Netflix or AMC production!

Simplified E-commerce Experience

Next on our list of holiday digital marketing trends is selling goods online. E-commerce isn’t new, but the abandoned shopping cart is. This can happen because you’re an unknown to a consumer and they are wary of inputting sensitive data. Even though e-commerce is more than 10 years old, it still feels risky to some buyers, especially with new websites.

You can get around the trust issue by:

1. Having a secure site (SSL Certificate)
2. Ensuring that your products are good enough to by
3. Converting your product’s features into benefits with friendly, emotional language so that you build a bridge between you and the consumer (avoid corporate speak)
4. Displaying payment provider trust badges and seals
5. Ensuring your site features some sweet deals.

Next, make the transition to payment easy and smooth. Don’t insist on buyer registration, but do try to capture a user’s email address early on. On the payment pages, remove distractions by stripping out headers and footers. The payment information and cart pages should illustrate a two- or three-step process and that’s quick and easy, along with a decent number of call to actions.

Offer Discounts and Free Gifts

One of the biggest digital marketing holiday trends is shopping online — you already know that. But do you know that this the time to prioritize an increase in conversions? One of the easiest ways to do this is with a free gift. What you give away depends on your industry, but the quality should be good and the gift something that appeals to buyers.

Develop two or three spending thresholds that give the buyer a discount and a gift. The discount increases when a consumer passes each of the two or three thresholds, and so does the value of the gift. This can sound like a difficult structure to implement, but your e-commerce provider should be able to help you integrate your offer so that it’s easy for customers to follow prompts through to check-out.

Use a Chatbot

Chatbot technology has been around for a while, and when businesses first implemented chatbots on their sites, customers either didn’t like them or became frustrated. However, in this digital marketing holiday trends post, we can confidently say that the technology lets brands to improve customer service by saving them time and money.

Chatbots are much better and more user-friendly, and consumers are accepting them. They can manage issues before consumers move on human staffers. And sourcing the answers to technical questions is something that chatbots can do much faster than humans.

This technology is evolving rapidly and morphing into something much more human-like. Humour and personality are infused into the new era of chatbots. Savvy businesses can modify them so they offer tailored services to customers who need assistance, even when your business is closed.

Chatbot integration into a website is fairly straightforward. And the fact that they can keep useful information your business can use as part of its marketing strategies is a powerful asset.

Memorable Micro-Moments

In the 1950’s, marketing was all about being there at the right place and time. Funny how some things go full circle. Micro-moments can say the same thing. A micro-moment is when a consumer uses their device in a deliberate way because they have a need or a want — and they are going to act on it, mostly likely with their smartphone.

Your business has to be there and stand out in those micro-moments. A big part of digital marketing holiday trends relies on using your marketing data to identify your consumers “I-need-it-now” moments. Look at where they are and how they make decisions about what to purchase.

Create a strategy for your marketing channels and deliver the content that will capture attention.  Remember, you need to do more than just be there. Instead, respond to what they are doing and provide the solutions, products or information they want.

To learn more about how to leverage these trends to take your holiday marketing campaign to the next level, speak to one of our digital marketing experts at TechWyse by calling 866.208.3095 or contact us here.