Is It Too Early to Start Planning Your Holiday Campaigns?

Spoiler alert: the answer is “No!”  This year digital sales during the holiday shopping season will be bigger than ever. As noted in this Entrepreneur article: 

“Insider Intelligence’s U.S. Ecommerce Forecast sees digital sales growing by nearly 18% in 2021 compared to 2020. Brick-and-mortar retail is also predicted to grow, but only by approximately 6%. The forecasters believe that the growth will continue after the pandemic subsides as it is likely to be a permanent shift in consumer behavior.”

Every year, most retailers see a majority of their sales during the period leading up to and including Cyber Week, the days around Thanksgiving and the following Cyber Monday.  With this expected growth for e-commerce, digital marketing strategies during the holidays should be defined and developed as early as possible.  This article highlights the importance of this for a few specific channels.

• Search-engine marketing (SEM): Unlike search-engine optimization, or SEO which often has a long lead time to deliver results, it’s not too late to start optimizing SEM campaigns for holiday. As noted in the article, “Generic keywords will be useful throughout the year, but during the holiday season, it is important to narrow them further and target customers even better than normal.” 

• Email: This tends to be a large channel for retailers during most of the year and they should be designing compelling content now for their holiday communication. Inspiration is a big part of holiday shopping, including finding unique gifts or great deals, and retailers can be optimizing email content and messaging to capture customers when their intent to spend is highest.   

• Social Media: As this article states, sales this channel is expected “to increase by more than 35% this year to more than $36 billion.” This is another opportunity for retailers to target the right customers during the holiday.  To do this they need to analyze where their campaigns perform best with their target customers because the same campaign may not be effective across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.  

As someone who has worked in ecommerce for the last 10 years, I can confirm that retailers are thinking about holiday tactics as early as June and July every year.  Black Friday through Cyber Monday is basically the “Superbowl” of retail and companies would be best served by focusing their holiday messages on relevant content and in the right channels for their business. 

J.C. Penney Aims to Reconnect by Pulling on Heartstrings

Taking a note from Marks & Spencer, J.C. Penney is aiming to reconnect with its customers by reminding people what it means to give throughout the holiday seasons.  Their associates will be donning white gloves, and J.C. Penney will be using the hashtag #JustGotJingled to encourage random acts of kindness among their consumers on social media.   They will also be promoting the  They will be participating in various acts of kindness during the campaign, like inviting the boys and girls club for a holiday shopping trip and having a "street team of elves".  The idea is to remind customers that J.C. Penney is "heart and wallet" responsible.

In addition, J.C. Penney is using digital marketing to connect with its Hispanic consumers via Spanish-language ads and a video series.  They are trying to adjust their strategy to encompass the wider Hispanic market, which is growing.

However, that all said, their implementation of social media strategy seems a little dubious.  First, they did not really discuss unique ways of employing social media, just that they will be encouraging customers to post their own social media videos.  Secondly, while they have some campaign ideas and a hashtag, they lack the authenticity of the idea of "giving".  Marks and Spencer did a good job by creating buzz, it seems that J.C. Penney is doing this backwards.  Finally, their video series for targeting Hispanic consumers is up on AOL online - which doesn't seem too customer-savvy.

Read more about J.C. Penney's ad campaign here

Holiday Shopping in the Digital Age.

It’s hard to even remember the time before “Cyber Monday”- the time when “Black Friday” was the only game in town and you had to bundle up to brave the cold, November temperatures to score the latest digital gadget or hottest new toy.  But now, we can comfortably sit in our pajamas, waiting for the digital channel to go live. 

Marketers are taking an aggressive approach to expanding the convenience associated with online shopping by allowing customers to purchase online and pick-up in the store.  This way customer can avoid the crowds, but still have access to their purchase without having to wait for delivery.  Target has rolled out this service to all of its retail outlets (where previously it had only been available in half). 

Target is also entering into the competitive TV advertising space to publicize the promotions available for Cyber Monday.  Target has produced over 20 commercials inspired by the hashtag #mykindofholiday to highlight the various ways in which people celebrate.  The campaign is fully integrated with the social media strategy to create a true omni-channel experience to the customer.  For example, Target will highlight 100 products in its stores that have been trending well on Pinterest and will allow people to pin images/videos from its online catalogs to a digital pinboard. 

While marketers have been emphasizing just this type of integrated, omni-channel experience, it will be interesting to see how marketers measure the success of such programs.  Is having a Pinterest driven approach to product selection a strategy that demonstrates measurable returns to the business? Surely savvy companies like Target, Walmart, and Amazon will quickly figure out what the value is and others will follow suit. 

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