The holiday season is the time of the year when B2B marketers must ignore their product-centric habits when engaging with prospective customers. As the last few vacation days are being scheduled and teams hunker down to meet year-end goals, it’s going to be much harder to draw their attention. However, there ismuch B2B marketers can learn from some of the core holiday traditions.
Here are four simple tips that you can easily incorporate into your holiday campaigns to boost engagement and brand credibility:
1. Incentives Are Always A Good Thing
Nothing personifies the holidays more than a little gift giving! Something as simple as a gift card can have a big impact on campaign response rates. Demand Gen Report, for example, has taken the incentive approach with a recent email campaign promoting the upcoming B2B Marketing Exchange in Scottsdale, AZ. Offering a two-for-one deal to attendees who buy a ticket for a colleague is one of the many ways we are encouraging our audience to get into the gift-giving spirit this holiday season.
2. Package Your Content Together
Much like collecting a variety of small gifts and wrapping them in one basket or box, or legendary musicians offering a deluxe set of songs and albums, many B2B marketers are finding success with packaging relevant content together as an offering to key prospects. LinkedIn recently launched a campaign where they packaged content together into a “holiday box set” and shared it through email. The email linked to a webpage where all the ungated content was available.
3. Personalization Helps You Stand Out
The one-to-one connection between the gift-giver and the recipient is always warm-hearted and personal, and some B2B marketers know that a little personalization can go a long way for staying top-of-mind within their audience. Vidyard’s holiday campaign consisted of a piece of video content that was personalized with recipients’ names. Having that right piece of personalized content — at the right time — can leave a lasting impression on prospects leading into 2017.
4. Just Saying Thank You Goes A Long Way
There will always be a need for sales-focused content, but that type of messaging should be far from the conversations taking place during the holidays. In the same Vidyard holiday campaign mentioned earlier, the personalized video content was not designed to inform viewers about their product, but instead to wish them happy holidays. Something as simple as a “Thank You” message can be a breath of fresh air for a prospect that has been inundated with sales pitches from other B2B vendors all year.
Those are just some of the ways you can get your marketing initiatives aligned with the holiday spirit. Has your team taken an innovative approach to engaging your audience this holiday season? Let us know what you’ve been up to — and the success you’ve seen — in the comments below.