Now is the season to start thinking about yule tide cheer and full shopping carts. Holiday blog marketing campaigns should begin, well, yesterday. In fact, you are too late for the early bird shoppers.

“According to the results of the July 2007 ShopLocal.com online poll, exactly one-third of respondents have already crossed items off their holiday shopping lists… Many respondents (18 percent) reported getting a jump on their holiday gift giving by using the Internet to research information on big-ticket holiday gift items like the iPhone, laptop computers, jewelry, flat-screen televisions….As for those who have already made purchases, the survey showed that consumers are buying both online (13 percent) and at “brick and mortar” retailers (49 percent) — with 38 percent saying they have purchased items through both channels for people on their holiday list.”

The brick and mortar who can coordinate their TV campaign with their online strategy will, according to a 2006 Marketing Evolution study, increase their brand exposure.

“…With TV alone indexing at 100, brand awareness increased to 138 when online was added to TV in the mix. This increase was the average across an aggregate of 20 studies, 10 of which had sufficient sample size to examine each combination of media…”

Matt McGee at Search Engine Land has an excellent overview on pre-holiday optimization that ends with some excellent advice.

“You can be sure that your big competitors have been putting together holiday plans for a few months now. As a small retailer, it’s okay if you haven’t started that early. But it’s not okay to wait much longer. It’s only August, but preparing now is the key to a happy holiday shopping season.”

Tags: Blog Marketing, brand_awareness, brick_and_mortar, holiday_shopping, marketing_campaigns, shopping_carts

This entry was posted on Friday, August 17th, 2007 at 7:24 pm and is filed under Blog Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.