Is it just us, or has this year flown? Its distinct lack of lockdowns, and so actually doing things, has potentially created this feeling. While we’re not complaining about the greater freedoms of the year, the speed of it means we’re suddenly facing closing up one year and entering another. With that, what do you do with your digital activity when you and your audience pause life as usual to take on the holiday break (whatever that looks like). For the most part, this can be entirely seamless if you’re organised and put in the ground work to keep your audiences feeling valued, while not wasting good strategies and content during low engagement periods.
If you have ad campaigns running for services, products or special offers that are difficult to uphold during trading down time, don’t waste your money keeping them running. Even if they convert, you are risking a high friction experience from the customer who may not be expecting delivery, service or contact delays on the assumption that you are up and running as normal. Instead, pause them completely until you’re back to business, or set up ads that represent what you can fulfil or want to specifically promote during the holiday period.
If you aren’t already, utilise third party social media scheduling to ensure you don’t miss posts you want sent out, don’t drop the ball on consistency and can pace your posts out to suit the likelihood of an engaged audience (for example, Christmas Day is typically low traction). In fact, you can make this your 2023 resolution to continue using these functions. It is a real ‘work smarter not harder’ way of keeping up with your social media activity, without having to be on top of everything all the time, in real time. For Facebook, you can use their internal scheduling function.
From pop ups to contact forms, have your website represent your real-time, realistic activity during the downtime. If you have an online contact form that generates a hello email, restructure the messaging to be informative about what your new audience can expect: opening hours, adjusted delivery times, service availability… This is all valuable and important information for setting up clear expectations and building trust from the get-go at a time where people are receiving bulk promotion emails. You will stand out. Additionally, adjust the messaging in much the same way on your pop-ups, home page, contact page and delivery information page.
If you have a digital agency or internal digital team/manager, don’t feel like you have to be all over the activity they organise for the holiday break. Of course, asking them what their strategy is is completely reasonable and expected, but the reason you have these teams in the first place is to take the burden from your shoulders. Make good on that at a time of year you have a genuine opportunity to relax. Ask them what they see as the best strategy, have any questions you have answered, then trust your digital team to deploy the strategy and keep your digital presence ticking successfully in the right areas, at the right times.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
