Holiday Analytic Must-Haves: How to set yourself up to track a successful holiday season

The holiday season offers a large variety of events in a relatively short period of time, making it the most profitable time of year for many companies. Wedding season is all about weddings; birthdays and social events happen throughout the year. Yet, the holiday season is a crunch time of Black Friday sales, Christmas shopping, holiday parties, New Years' celebrations, and more. There's no question about it: the holidays are lucrative for virtually every industry.

However, if your sales and marketing approach isn’t up to snuff to draw in new leads, you’ll end up missing out on a lot of good business that is up for grabs. Worse still, if you don’t know why your outreach strategies aren’t performing as expected, there’s little hope that you can pick up the pace and catch up during the busy holiday season.

In order to identify opportunities (or where you might be losing business), you need to take advantage of your analytics to discover new, more effective strategies to fill in those gaps. Here are a few pro tips to set you up for a successful holiday season.

Start early.

If there’s one tip you take from this, let it be this one: Starting early is the key to a smooth and rewarding holiday season. The closer to the holidays you get, the more other businesses start advertising. As a result, ad costs can go up and it becomes harder to rise above the noise. So, don’t wait until the Monday before Thanksgiving to start and assume that your ads will be effective.

Begin working on audience building well before Black Friday. In fact, try to build your audience in early fall by running small, low-cost ads to direct traffic to your website. Then, by the time Black Friday and subsequent holidays roll around, you can run ads that target those who have already visited your website (and lookalike audiences), so you can make the most of your holiday ad spend.

Track where people are coming from.

Most businesses see an uptick in web traffic during the holidays, but that's not to say it's all qualified. Look at your Google Analytics to see where people are coming from — are they coming from outside of your usual geographic region? What content are they looking at on your website? Ideally, you’ll have some conversion goals already set up in Google Analytics so you can determine which web visitors are turning into inquiries.

If you are putting more effort into social media, look at your insights to determine how much website traffic is coming from social channels. What posts are getting the most clicks to your website? How many DMs are you receiving, and how many of them convert into booked clients? Remember: Social media is a marketing tool that is ultimately in service to get inquiries for your business. It can be fun, but it must be effective at drumming up new business.

Adjust your tactics as needed.

An effective marketing strategy presents the right message to the right people at the right time. Discovering the ideal timing, messaging and targeting mix is made easier with split testing.  Instead of putting up one ad, put up multiple ads with distinct copy, images, or calls to action. Change only one thing at a time per test for the most accurate results. It's hard to fail with messaging when you're performing robust testing to see what truly hits the mark with your audience.

Ads fail not because of faulty messaging, but because you’re attempting to target the wrong people or the right people at the wrong time. When you work with ‘cold’ audiences (folks who have never heard of you and don’t have enough information to trust you enough to do business with you), you need to invest some time into warming them up and helping them to get to know your brand. Make sure that you have several different ‘pre-warmed’ audiences to target during the holiday season, including people who have visited your website, signed up for your email list, and interacted with you on social media. These are the very best audiences to perform testing because you don’t have to lay out the groundwork to earn their recognition.

While it’s best to get your marketing plan in place earlier in the year, it’s never too late to ramp up your holiday push. At any point, you can always dig your heels in deeper and use your analytics to optimize your approach and better serve your audience with useful content and holiday discounts.

Christie Osborne is the owner of Mountainside Media, a company that helps event industry professionals brands develop scalable marketing strategies that bring in more inquiries and leads. Christie is a national educator with recent speaking engagements at NACE Experience, WIPA, and the ABC Conference.