marketing advisor for

small and medium businesses

Christmas advisor is an initiative of Etarget advertising network in

cooperation with notable European specialists on internet market-

ing. Our goal is to help (mostly) small and medium businesses to get

ready for upcoming Christmas season in marketing area.

According to researches customers start shopping presents already

in the end of October. That is the reason why we prepared some

changes in Etarget advertising as well as this advisor.

In case you like it, try also our blog, Twitter or Facebook. May you

have any questions, feel free to contact us at

pavol.magic@etarget.eu or send an email to your local Etarget rep-

resentative.

We wish you merry and wealthy Christmas!

The Etarget Team

What should SMBs do this Xmas to get the

maximum out of them?

C hristmas time is a great occasion to incorporate the holidays into your PPC cam-

paign. This includes building out holiday-themed landing pages for specific

product/services, targeting seasonal keywords and altering your call to action to

include special Christmas deals.

Customers shopping for Christmas gifts will be to be attracted to special seasonal

deals promoted in your AdWords ads. Using phrases like “While Stocks Last” or “Limited

Stock Available” and holiday promotion terms as “Free Shipping/ Free Wrapping” can

additionally boost your marketing efforts. Make the landing page easy enough so the

average visitor can make a purchase within a few clicks. Review your checkout process

to be sure it’s working correctly for a smooth transaction.

According to Google, 54% of users who researched online but bought offline used their

mobile devices to conduct a search. One of the best ways to drive search traffic into

your store or office using paid search and geo-location targeting is to test mobile

search, consider click-to-call AdWords and optimise Google Places to show nearest re-

tail store location. Make sure to include holiday coupon codes in your Google Place

listing to stand out from the competition. Why not email coupon codes or discounts to

all current and past customers as both a gift to your clients and a way to boost your

seasonal revenue? Not only will this make them feel special and encourage them to

purchase but it can easily be promoted through email marketing. Consider also incor-

porating the increasingly popular group/coupon sites as Groupon, Retail Me Not or

Coupon Cabin into your Christmas marketing mix.

Stanislav Dimitrov, ICYGEN (www.icygen.com)

Think Different!

W hen it comes to Christmas, everyone starts thinking of holidays, presents,

joy. And what is expected from the business is to do everything possible to

support the festive spirit.

What have I noticed in my last 15 years in a corporate environment? During Christmas

time companies usually:

Buy branded gifts for their main business contacts;

Offer huge discounts and promotions on their mass products;

Give their employees a yearly bonus.

What is the result of such efforts?

You do everything as the others: you donʼt stand out and most of the time you just

waste your money;

Most of the branded gifts your important contacts receive are thrown away, be-

cause they are either useless or your logo makes them such;

You don't make any new clients during that time and often you lose some.

What could be done differently this Xmas?

I recommend you to start by preparing a list with objectives you'd like to achieve dur-

ing that time. What could be on such list?

Win new customers;

Increase loyalty within existing clients, partners, vendor, employees;

Increase sales;

Increase awareness;

Distinguish your company;

Etc.

The list above is not exhausting but it could give you an idea of what exactly should

be on it. Next step for you should be to answer the question “how can I achieve those

goals?”. My advise is to carefully calculate what you could spend on Xmas goodies, but

this time from an investment point of view.

Let's spend some time thinking what is that that could help you achieving your Xmas

goals and in the same time could be considered an investment. Could that be the

branding of the most advanced USB stick? Or a 2011 calendar? Or maybe mouse

pads? Don't be quick in saying “yes” or “no”. In my experience, any common branded

merchandise won't help much. But if it's branded not with your logo but with your

prospect's name, that'll make the whole difference. Most of the D and C level manag-

ers won't use anything branded with someone else's logo, but will use with great

pleasure something branded with their initials. And even though your logo is not on

the gift, it'll have a much better place: in your prospects‘ heads.

Another thing you could do is to give your top clients a special discount/preferential

conditions, which will be valid throughout 2011. You could even go one step further

and offer them something for free or a prize, if they bring you new business. You could

also think about giving them with special experience. It could be a Xmas party, but it's

always tricky with those. There might be another 2 parties same night, a problem

could occur, the budget might not be enough to cover everything you want. In my

opinion it's better to personalise the experience and make it last a bit longer. Like if

one of your top clients is a fan of a local football team, to give him a yearly pass to all

matches.

You could even prepare your company's club card: ask all your clients, partners, em-

ployees and include in it their special offers. Give one of those to each of your contacts

as a Xmas gift. They'll benefit from the fact that they're your contacts by all the dis-

counts and bonuses they get through this card.

No matter what you choose to do, I would like to take this opportunity and wish you a

Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year!

Maria Toycheva, Evision Bulgaria (LinkedIn profile)

How to Raise Your Christmas Sales

F or most of the e-shops is Christmas season the Holy Grail

of sales. Preparations for this hectic time of the year start

when our future customers go on summer holiday and have

no idea about Christmas. I’d like to show you few tips how

to support your Christmas sales directly on your web site and also

mention ways how to raise your web traffic with offline activities.

Christmas centre

Favourite activity of major e-shops is to create special sections dedicated to gifts. This

centre usually contains gifts segmented by target group (gift for parents, kids, grand-

parents, etc.). It can have it’s own URL like www.eshop-name.com/christmas, so you can

share the link easily. The content doesn’t have to be strictly gift list, but as well an ad-

visor—how to choose the right gift. If it’s too complicated for you, try at least creating

Christmas design and a list of appropriate products on the home page.

Articles, videos and competitions

People usually like to read advices and top lists. Try writing an article “Hits of Christ-

mas 2010” or make a video with instructions on how to pack your gift. It is also quite

common to make competitions to attract customers’ attention.

Gift vouchers, bundles or something for free

Customers are sometimes afraid, that when they will buy a gift for someone, they won’t

like it. That is the reason why you should offer various vouchers. Bundles of several

products are also very popular among customers, try offering them. Consider having

Christmas gifts delivered for free, if you already don’t. It can help you get more orders

and raise your sales.

Offline promotion

Having Christmas centre, articles and fantastic bundles on your web, but not having

the traffic means, that your effort was good for nothing. But how to get visitors? First

you should focus on your existing customers with special Christmas direct e-mail. It

can be usual product mail, special Christmas promotion, or visually interesting e-mail

with reminder to shop early. You can market your current customers with Facebook

page, too, if you cared about them the whole year and build a strong community.

Now it’s necessary to attract new customers. You can use Christmas “hubs”—special

web sites, which aggregate the offer from several e-shops for a fee. Last but not least

you should use PPC campaign both in search and content and if you have the budget,

buying banner ad campaign on web sites where your target group is present.

Michal Krutiš, H1.cz (www.h1.cz)

Don’t be afraid to experiment!

S tarting the Christmas campaign early and finishing as late as possible paid of for

me well in the past seasons. The best solution is to start all campaigns in early

October and finish on December 20, if possible.

Use the time until half November to experiment with different variations of text and

design of the ads. Carefully evaluate not only the price and click through rate, but also

return on investment (the ratio of cost and revenue on transaction).

Be sure to save up to half of the budget for the last fourteen days of the campaign—

your competition will be out of money and energy by then, but the biggest shopping

madness will only start.

Martin Kopta, analytik & UX designer (martinkopta.cz)

Christmas: Plan B

I t is trendy to look for sources of alternative hedon-

ism this year. Instead of going on vacation to see,

flat and flatter TV and gift pack of Johny Walker

Black Label we’ll keep on meeting those, who enjoy

having a garden in the city, having the luxury of

flexible work schedule or the privilege to be the house-

hold with minimum carbon footprint.

On one hand it’s—as I already mentioned—trendy and on the other it doesn’t cost a bit

and that counts. For the Christmas period I can offer one—from todays perspective

spiritually quite exotic—form of alternative hedonism: trying to remember the original

purpose and content of Christmas as the holiday of expectation, coming and hope. And

I’m not writing about hope that our wallets will open wide and we all will once again

breath in the anaesthetics of consumption. I’m writing about hope—without any partic-

ular reason—for new beginnings, in which present is the reconciliation with past. Like

to scared shepherds the angels are coming to us in pillars of light to tell us something,

that with the best will we can only understand only as the “voice of the greater power”,

and not as utterance to ourselves and us alone. We are bathing in the potential of

hope and yet we still cannot sense the outlines of our personal story of hope. Never

mind. Maybe on this years Christmas you could instead of “3 for the price of 2” or

“incredible New Years’ discounts in November” try enforcing a message about hope in

your company. It might work.

Tomáš Hrivnák, Idealisti (idealisti.cz)

Measure correctly

T he charming part of online advertising is the ability to measure, well,

almost everything. But do you know how to measure correctly?

My Christmas advice is easy to implement, yet very important. Mark your URLs

correctly in all your marketing properties—emails, banners, contextual ads.

You will have much better data if you do this step right.

This is how the correctly tagged URL should look like:

What does these parameters mean?

utm_source=etarget—you can name your sources the way you like it. Ideally, tag your

source as the web site from which traffic is coming, or by the name of the channel

(Etarget).

utm_medium=text—medium indicates whether your customer came from banner, text

ad or email, for example.

utm_campaign=xmas-promo—if you tag your campaign correctly, you will have better

overview of which of your campaigns perform correctly, and you can always compare

them to other campaigns. If you tag campaigns with numbers (such as 1,2,3), sooner or

later, you will be unable to remember what kind of campaign it was.

If you know the value of each conversion (sales), you can make your future budgeting

easier for yourself. You will have clear statistics, and you will be able to attribute con-

versions to the correct sources.

Katarína Šavelová, RUonline (www.AreYouOnline.sk)

Think long-term

E verybody is thinking about Christmas season these days. That is the reason why you should think differently.

Imagine this: You are about to spend a lot of money on attracting new customers. They come to your website, look around and never come back again. It is not because you are bad, or because your products are unattractive. The customer just wants to give perfect gift, he has got an idea on his mind—and you don’t mirror all ideas of all people. However, it certainly does not mean he can’t return in a month or two and buy for reason other than Christmas gift. I suggest to all entrepreneurs and marketers: Give a helping hand to all your future customers. Make it easier for them to shop for your product in the future. Go get their contact details. Allow them to register, even if they didn’t buy anything. Picture your offer in the most vivid colours. What do they get if they leave you email? Free ebook? Interesting tips? Build the database of your prospects. Do not loose single potential customer once you paid for him. Use Christmas season to build your database. Once the Christmas frenzy is over, you can start building connection to your leads. They know who you are, they visited your site. This is the way to reach new customers—for the next year´s Christmas.

Monika Jakubeczová, University of online entrepreneur (www.jakubeczova.sk)

Christmas is the right time to improve

your branding

B randing is not a rocket science. You just have to find something that you do real-

ly well, and no one else does, and communicate it clearly. It also has to be

something that people are willing to pay for. And remember that you have to be

able to maintain this position in long-term.

Once you find your unique selling point, you have to move. Everything that moves is

alive. Innovate, brainstorm. Make people know about your efforts. Remember who you

are and keep focused on the direction you have chosen.

My Christmas tip? This season is not only good for sales. Stop, reflect on your next

steps. Decide what will you do next year. And the year after.

Richard Mareček, Hospodárske noviny (www.hnx.sk)

Merry Christmas!