This week, focusing on retail, Connective3's Will Waldron shares a four-step strategy for planning and executing optimized digital marketing during peak sales periods.
An always-on approach to digital marketing is vital to your online brand’s performance, but ramping up activity during key sales periods can have a huge impact on your revenue and authority.
Coordinating a digital PR link building strategy with technical on-site search engine optimization (SEO) and paid media is the secret to this kind of success, but how can you take it a step further to make the most of your brand’s key sales period?
There are a few things to get right: timing, aligning strategies, staying ahead of competitors, overcoming media saturation, aligning across channels, and measuring the success of each department.
1. Timeframe
Knowing your brand's key sales periods can help you plan ahead. At the beginning of each year, analyze the previous year's sales data to see if there are any trends or spikes in revenue for your products, services, or categories. Once you know which weeks or months were critical to your success, make sure everyone on your team marks them off on their calendars.
There are often obvious peak sales periods based on seasonal, cultural, political, economic, or other events. In these cases, plan based on the successes and challenges of the previous year. Depending on the creativity and scale of your creative deliverable, planning should begin 3-6 months before the event to allow your team optimal preparation time.
2. Strategic Alignment
Then determine your primary goal: surpass last year's revenue, increase awareness, beat your competitors, sell a certain amount of products, etc. Then you can start aligning your core. How do you strengthen and synergize each channel?
Your digital PR and SEO teams should work together throughout this process. Develop an outreach strategy by identifying priority pages and categories on your site. Keywords, clicks, conversions, and general page views will help determine which areas to focus on. Then, you'll need to customize a strategy for each to maximize performance.
Digital PR campaign ideas should be multipurpose and include keywords. Be sure to include backlinks to your target category and product pages to maximize visibility, and reach out to relevant publications to derive maximum SEO value from your links.
Run hero campaigns that tell the complete story with your brand messaging, and “proactive” campaigns that drive more targeted backlinks. Stay reactive to keep your brand up to date and in the spotlight. Paid media insights like trending products, audience insights and changes in search behavior can feed back into your proactive campaigns to help you stay relevant. Finally, include press releases for your products or services in your outreach to create relevant roundups.
3. Media Saturation
During major sales periods, the market becomes highly saturated as your competitors will also be trying to do the same. Keep a close eye on your competitors throughout the year, look at their activity during previous sales periods, and evaluate their approach.
Look at your competitors’ keyword traffic share, research the types of campaigns they run, identify their social media approach, and check their pay-per-click (PPC) impression share. Once you know your competitors’ strategies, use your ideation session to determine areas of focus, whether that be competing further on keywords, performing link intersects to find sites your competitors link to (that you don’t), or identifying areas of PPC where your competitors’ depth is less competitive.
4. Results
Success during your key sales period depends on your primary goal. It might be to beat last year's performance or outperform your competitors. However, there are also key metrics you should report on to demonstrate a synergistic approach across channels: increased visibility, number of products or services sold, revenue, traffic share to keywords, return on ad spend, etc. Make sure you monitor all of these closely to stay competitive.
For a more in-depth analysis of the retail heroes and villains of 2024, Focus Week Hub.
