Take Advantage of Smart Links This Holiday Season
Give Your Marketing Campaign an Edge Over Your Competition
The holiday season is the best time of year for businesses from a revenue perspective as it allows consumers to spend more freely. If you have an e-commerce business or a retail business, you should have a sound holiday marketing strategy to capitalize on this. Social media and marketing trends are evolving rapidly in this day and age. To stay ahead of the game, you need to up your marketing strategy. Using smart links extensively, you can create a smarter holiday marketing strategy for this holiday season.
In this article, we delve deeper into using Smart Links this holiday season and cover the following:
- Smart Links for the Un-Initiated
- How Can Smart Links Aid Marketing?
- Marketing Strategies to Implement This Holiday Season and How to Make Them Smarter With Smart Links
- Plan and Start Your Marketing Campaign Early On
- Use Smart Links in Email Marketing Campaigns
- Create Festive-Centred Content
- Rain Offers and Discounts
- Collab With Influencers and Leverage the Power of Affiliate Marketing
- Use Custom Domains for Your Holiday Campaigns
- Use Social Cards Instead of Boring Urls in All Holiday-Related Social Media Content
- Don’t Ignore the Basics
Smart Links for the Un-Initiated
On social media, links to your website or product page are what you promote to drive traffic to your website. However, there are a few limitations when using standard links on social media platforms. Instagram, for example, does not allow you to have more than one clickable link in its bio. This might seriously hamper your ability to promote your brand, especially if you have multiple websites or use numerous channels to promote them.
Enter smart links! Visually, smart links transform boring long URLs into short meaningful, word-based links. What makes them “smart” is their capability to transform your marketing strategy.
Smart links can be programmed to contain multiple links. For example, a smart link in your Instagram Bio can be programmed to show customers numerous links to your channels and let them choose which one they would like to visit. Smart links can also be programmed to contain various offers, redirecting the customer to different landing pages based on conditions such as geo-location, language, and so on.
Now that you know what smart links can do, let’s see how you can utilize smart links for smarter Holiday Marketing!
How Can Smart Links Aid Marketing?
Smart links can be highly beneficial when included in your marketing strategy. Not only are they easy to read, but when used in social cards, they are also visually appealing replacements for boring URLs. They also help re-enforce your brand name, where ever they are used.
Smart links are trackable. This implies that you can add UTM parameters, giving you crucial information such as where your visitors are coming from, which marketing channels are driving them to your website, which campaign they respond to, and which targeted keywords they respond to. This information can be highly beneficial to help you optimize your marketing strategy.
Marketing Strategies to Implement This Holiday Season and How to Make Them Smarter With Smart Links
Here is a compilation of 8 marketing strategies to implement this holiday season and boost your brand’s online presence:
1. Plan and Start Your Marketing Campaign Early On
Building a seasonal marketing campaign does not happen overnight. The algorithms toiling away in the background need time to discover and index new products or landing pages. Creating new pages or promotional content at the last minute will not result in any organic ranking.
Publish your content at least a month or before the season begins, and replace all your boring/generic URLs with Smart Links. This will give you plenty of time to perform A/B testing and optimize your content accordingly for when the peak buying season begins.
If you are wondering how early is too early, try this for your brand’s Holiday season marketing strategy- Plan in September, Test in October, Implement in November, Refine in December, and Review in January.
2. Use Smart Links in Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing is a tried and tested marketing strategy. That said, consumers have become apprehensive about interacting with brand emails due to increased email phishing frauds and repetitive spam. If you are using long and unappealing URLs in your email campaigns, you may be losing out on a lot of potential customer interactions. Here again, using smart links can come to your aid. Smart links can transform your URL in the following manner:
https://www.yourbrandname.com/2022/offers/best%20discounts%20on%20toys%20for%20your%family#this%seaon
to
yourcompany/bestchirstmasoffers
As smart links are more readable, they help convey your brand message better. Smart links also look more authentic, increasing the chances of potential customers interacting with your promotional emails. To top it off, with the tracking capability of smart links, you can alter your email marketing campaign based on buyer personas with the data collected from UTM parameters.
3. Create Festive-Centred Content
We have already established that it takes time to rank organically and maintain authority and links built over time. When creating season content, if you use URLs such as “yourcompany/2022blackfridaydeals“, you will not be able to repurpose this again next year. Instead, suppose you were to use an evergreen URL such as “yourcompany/blackfridaydeals.” In that case, you can repurpose this year after year while retaining all the authority and links built over the previous years.
The holiday season always heightens customer emotions from excitement to nostalgia. Try to use festive keywords in your smart links that will trigger said emotions to rank higher and gain more visibility.
4. Rain Offers and Discounts
Who does not like discounts? While the holiday season brings a lot of joy, it can also be expensive for many. If you can entice your customers with great deals and product bundles, you will definitely draw higher traffic than your competition. On top of offers, reward customers that spend extra on your product or services. This is a great way to bump up your average order value.
Make use of dynamic smart links to promote offers and discounts. For example, if a customer clicks on an offer that has expired, rather than directing them to a page that says, “Sorry, this offer is no longer available,” you can redirect them to another landing page with an active offer. With this, no click goes wasted.
5. Collab With Influencers and Leverage the Power of Affiliate Marketing
You definitely want to invest in Affiliate Marketing with the help of social media influencers for smarter holiday marketing. Take time to research influencers who hold good authority in your domain. While there is no shortage, you should be strategic about whom you choose to collaborate with. Choose an influencer that takes social responsibility seriously and has similar values and a target audience you are looking for.
Create smart affiliate links for influencers to promote. These links can redirect potential customers to different landing pages based on the language they speak or to an offer page that will most likely result in a conversion based on buyer personas or even based on their geo-location.
6. Use Custom Domains for Your Holiday Campaigns
Potential customers are flooded with promos during the holiday season. Custom domains can help you cut through the clutter and help your brand name and campaign stand out. There are three distinct advantages of using custom domains in your holiday promo campaigns. These include the following:
- They help you maintain brand consistency across multiple domains.
- As custom domains are connected to your brand, they will carry the same level of trust and encourage customers to click on your promo links.
- Custom domains can improve your SEO.
Running multiple campaigns using customer domains will help you rank higher as search engines look at site root domains.
7. Use Social Cards Instead of Boring Urls in All Holiday-Related Social Media Content
Social cards are a lot more eye-catching than boring URLs. What makes social cards great in holiday marketing is that you can create clickable images that induce emotions in your potential customers, encouraging them to interact with your content. Additionally, social cards are unique because the images themselves are clickable links. Embed them with smart links, and now you have an image that can harness the power of everything a smart link is capable of. Social cards are a must for Smarter Holiday Marketing this holiday season.
8. Don’t Ignore the Basics
The holiday season can be a stressful time for businesses. You can get overwhelmed with endless meetings to strategize new ideas for promotional content, working on how to attract new customers and retain existing ones. While getting engrossed with the finer points of your marketing strategy is easy, it is equally important to remember the basics.
Ensure all your pages are optimized, all ‘404 Errors’ are taken care of, check if your servers are keeping up with high load traffic, and ensure none of your SSLs is about to expire. It can be hard if an excellent marketing campaign does not perform well due to such trivial things.
Conclusion
The holiday season is the best time for businesses to generate a lot of revenue. It is also a good time to bond with your customers and create a community around your business with long-lasting relationships. Now that you know what smart links are and what they are capable of, you are fully equipped for smarter Holiday Marketing, which can help you achieve your business goal this holiday season.
