While 45% of consumers start their holiday shopping in October, that doesn’t mean you’re too late to get a piece of the revenue. As long as you already have your inventory on the way for FBA or have it in stock elsewhere, you’re still ahead of the game. You’ve managed to beat the crucial dates—particularly those on the Chinese holiday calendar—so now it’s time to make sure customers will buy your products.
In order to get your products in front of as many people as possible, you need to invest some time, energy, and, yes, money into private label marketing for the holidays. While marketing your products isn’t necessarily hard, there are several tasks you should complete right away, and many more you’ll need to attend to throughout the season.
Here’s what you need to know to get your private label marketing for the holidays on track.
Get Your Website in Shape
Even if you sell exclusively on Amazon, a website can only help you—as long as you have helpful, quality content that informs and educates buyers about your products. Think about it: You only have so much room within Amazon’s marketplace to tout your products. With your own website, you can take all the space you need for photos, videos, and product descriptions.
In addition to using all the space you need to tell buyers about your products, you also gain the benefit of additional SEO with your website. Not only will your buyers have a chance of finding you on Amazon when they search for products like yours, they’ll also be directed right to your website—cutting out all your competition.
And don’t worry; you can sell your products from your website through an eCommerce portal, but you don’t have to. Instead, you can link directly to the Amazon sales page so buyers can complete their purchases.
Explore Paid Advertising
Again, you can rely on Amazon’s search engines to direct buyers your way, but what if you had the ability to increase visibility and exposure without the assistance of Amazon? Whether you use Google, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram ads—or a combination of all the above—you can multiply the number of people who discover your products instantly.
There are some things to keep in mind before you start throwing your money at paid ads, however, especially if you plan to use Google. Many platforms are simple enough to discover as you go, but others may require the help of a specialist. PPC on Google Ads can be very complex, meaning you could pay a lot of money for something that never gets off the ground due to a simple error.
Something else to remember is that your ads should be bold, eye-catching, and absolutely true to your products. No one will thank you if your ad images don’t match the products they receive in their shipments, especially if they bought it as a gift for a loved one.
Build Some Landing Pages
If you have a website and choose to use paid advertising, it’s a great idea to have landing pages for buyers to visit after clicking on your ads. These landing pages are created as additional pages to your website so that your customers can see exactly what they want without needing to navigate your entire website whenever they click on an ad.
Think about it: How irritating would it be to find exactly what you need by Googling something, only to be taken straight to the company’s home page. You’d have to start your search all over again! Maybe some of your customers will want the product enough to spend more time searching, but many will back up and start again with a company that makes finding products as easy as a simple click.
Another big bonus to landing pages is that you can use them to gather information about your buyers, track their movements on your website, and even monitor the success of your ads and other marketing efforts. A Personalized URL (or PURL) for each landing page you use in ads will give you the ability to see exactly who visits which page and from where. You’ll know if Google works better for your marketing or if you need to stick with Facebook and Instagram. You’ll know which buyers have make previous purchases and which ones are still getting a feel for your merchandise.
Deck Your Social Media Posts
The beauty of social media is that you can use it to reach your audience at any moment of any day without spending any additional money. While you may decide to make use of Facebook ads to spread the word about your products, you can also rely on organic reach with simple posts about your online store.
With the use of engaging language and encouragements to share with friends, your organic social posts could see just as much mileage as your paid posts. Even better, they’re more likely to be viewed favorably, since they’re not considered “intrusive” the way that paid ads may be.
One last tip: It’s the holidays! Be sure to dress up your ads, landing pages, website, and social posts with images and colors of the season. Remind people that the holidays are upon us with snowflakes, snowmen, red, green, blue, wreaths, trees, and any other fun holiday themed designs your brand can handle. Because when your buyers start feeling the holiday spirit, they start pulling out that wallet.
If we can help you get any of these under control before the holidays get here, let us know. We’re always here to help you!
