The average UK consumer will be enjoying four to five days off work over the Easter period and, paired with reduced Retail opening hours, will have time to not only unwind, but will also mean they are more likely to spend time at home and online.
These consumers are likely to be searching for solutions so it’s important to make sure that your brand is there when they do. As Easter weekend approaches, it’s important to recognise whether it’s an opportunity for your business to capitalise on the extra traffic over the long weekend. Here are our top tips for getting your ducks (or chicks!) in a row to get the most out of your digital marketing strategy over the Easter weekend.
1. Planning
When undertaking any seasonal marketing campaign, it’s important to plan in advance. What are your goals? What budget will you need? Is Easter the right time for your business to increase spend and activity? Before starting, it’s important to understand your customer’s behaviour during Easter, whether you experience spikes during that period and which seasons are likely to be the most profitable for your business.
2. Create a consistent experience across all channels and devices
If you do decide to go ahead with seasonal advertising, it’s important to make sure you are consistent across all of your channels and devices. If you update your PPC or SEO campaigns with seasonal keywords, it’s important to align your landing pages and website with seasonal content and imagery to make the customer journey as smooth and seamless as possible.
3. Align your SEO strategy
Updating your SEO strategy in line with seasonal spikes is one of the main ways to capitalise on the increase in search volumes over the Easter weekend. Meghan Burton, Director of SEO, has been providing her top tips for making sure your SEO strategy is ready for the Easter weekend.
Keyword research
Are there any trends relevant to you around what your customers start to search for around Easter? From Mother’s Day gifts to bulbs and gardening equipment, making sure you’ve done your seasonal keyword research will help you to ensure that your content and web pages cover all elements of seasonal queries.
Keep an eye on the SERP landscape
Search engine results change with the seasons, depending on what Google perceives as intent for queries around certain times. Depending on your business, you may or may not experience a change in the search result pages around your products or services; take a look at what Google is favouring in the search results for your target keywords and make sure you have content that serves the intent of your users at this time of year.
Plan content
SEO is different to paid channels. You can’t turn activity up or down based on the time of year as SEO is based on iterative growth. That said, if you’re creating a regular stream of content for earned media or link earning purposes, you should tap into journalist and website publishing trends to maximise your chances of getting coverage. This may not help you in time for this year’s Easter holidays but it can help you to boost your future performance and add to your site’s overall authority.
4. CRO: Reap the rewards of increased conversions
From a CRO perspective, Emma Travis, Head of UX & CRO, says the increased traffic over periods such as Easter and Christmas presents a number of opportunities.
For businesses running ongoing CRO, there is an opportunity to reap the rewards of an increased conversion rate during a busy period. If this is you, make sure that any outstanding winning test variations have been implemented in advance to ensure you make the most of the increase in traffic.
The Easter period also offers an opportunity for low traffic websites that may ordinarily struggle to reach statistical significance. If this applies to you and you’re expecting some traffic increases, ensure any tests are carefully planned and remember it’s still important to give tests time to ‘cook’ before drawing any conclusions. We recommend running tests for a minimum of two business cycles and running a sample size calculation to ensure you have enough traffic before concluding your tests.
Many sites use holiday periods such as Easter to run promotions and sales. AB testing during these periods can produce abnormal results, as user behaviour during sales can differ to the norm. As such, we’d recommend embracing this and focusing AB testing activity at these times around gathering insight on promotional messaging that can be fed into optimising future campaigns.
Making even some of these changes to your digital marketing strategy can help you to capitalise on the increased traffic over the weekend as most of the UK’s consumers enjoy time of work and time to browse the internet. Whether it’s looking for gifts for their loved ones, Easter eggs or they’re completing DIY or gardening work at home, millions of consumers will be searching online so it’s important to make sure your business appears in the right place, at the right time.
If you want to know more about preparing your digital marketing for Easter, we’ll be publishing part two of our blog next week!