- Getting your customers to pay attention is harder and more than important than ever...
The holidays are one of the most competitive times for businesses. Customers are looking for the perfect presents and businesses are trying to ensure buyers that they’re the best option, leading to lengthy and expensive marketing campaigns. One of the biggest questions that plague marketing teams during the holiday season is what is the best approach to gaining traction. One that seems to work well, especially during holiday campaigns, is guerilla marketing.
Guerilla marketing is defined as an unconventional advertising strategy. It’s one of the most beneficial tactics for attracting customers during the holiday season because it’s unwarranted in its approach. The attempts made through guerilla marketing seem more sincere because they really can offer a glimpse into the brand behind whatever promotional products or ideas are being pushed. With that in mind, here are five guerilla marketing ideas for the holiday season that will excite and entice old and new customers alike:
Send Out Holiday Notes
Sending out physical holiday cards and notes to previous customers is a great guerilla marketing tactic. Especially if you are an online business, you’ll most likely have access to the addresses of your customers. Sending out a holiday greeting card is a great way to warmly surprise buyers, catching their attention while also delivering information about holiday sales, gifts, and goings-on at your business. With your holiday card, you can even send out coupons, such as 10 percent off offers, to encourage customers to shop for gifts at your business.
Public Art Installations
Public art installations are guaranteed to be a talking point amongst public viewers. These are temporary installations in public spaces, allowing you the flexibility of choosing art styles to suit holiday needs and locations you know will have foot traffic to help guarantee the most viewers. Public art installations are also shareable, and most likely will make it onto some form of social media. For example, Ikea went viral for using Banksy-like drawings across cities that consumers soon started posting to social media, turning their art into an online marketing campaign via story shares.
Social Media GeoFilters
Finding ways to resonate with social media users is one of the most difficult aspects of marketing campaigns, but one way that has continuously worked to encourage user interaction via social media is geofilters. Geofilters are visuals, usually illustrations that are layered onto pictures as “filters” within a certain geographical location. They can be used on Instagram, Facebook Stories, and Snapchat, and give users the opportunity to inform their followers where they are and what they’re doing.
Adding GeoFilters during the holiday is a great way to encourage consumers to interact with your store, and even contribute to promoting your brand. For example, your brick and mortar could incorporate a Hanukkah geofilter, adding a light to the menorah each night for Hanukkah. For Christmas, you could incorporate a countdown to Christmas feature into your filters. The options for the holidays are endless.
Pop-Up Events
Hosting pop-up events within your community is a fantastic opportunity to engage with holiday shoppers, and you don’t have to be a brick-and-mortar business front to do so. In fact, holiday pop-up events are a great way to take your business offline and into the real world for a day, engaging face to face with people and customers who may not have found you otherwise. Look for Christmas bazaars or community holiday events that offer vendor space to businesses and set up shop.
Interactive Online Advertisements
Shopping online during the holiday is a tradition of its own at this point. In fact, 85% of consumers will be shopping online this holiday season. With that much traffic online, it seems obvious to take up some online advertisement spacing, but in order to stand out from the crowd, try implementing some interactive online advertisements this holiday season. Interactive online advertisements engage with the consumer, these ads make consumers take time out of their day or their time scrolling to interact with your advertisement.
Online interactive advertisements come in many forms, look at an application like CandyCrush, they promote their holiday game packs through interactive pop-up ads on social media platforms that allow users to play a quick game to see if they enjoy the concept. If they win, they can be taken to the app store or to the game if they already have the app downloaded, and make in-app purchases.