During the holiday season you should put a lot of effort and money in online as well as offline marketing strategies. One of your priorities should be mobile marketing, because mobile adoption keeps increasing in all parts of the world.

• Use email marketing. Don’t trust the naysayers – email marketing is not dead! Create short and engaging newsletters with compelling headlines and multiple calls to action. Choose one hot product and use two or three calls to action for it in the text body of the newsletter. List other products, focusing on their greatest features. Create attractive subject lines, and add deadlines to your email offers.

• Hold holiday contests on your site and social media profiles. Contests help spread the word about your business and products. Offer rewards such as special holiday products, discount codes, or anything else you can thing off. Usually, your contest will have a bigger impact if you offer many small prizes rather than a few large ones. It’s better if 100 customers win a personalized T-shirt than if three customers win $1,000 each.

• Invest in paid search advertising. Cost-effective and extremely successful, paid search advertising can boost your sales dramatically. But you want to use all major search engines, not just Google, and update your ads and promotions in real-time.

• Invest in mobile marketing. You want to offer exclusive deals to mobile users. Conversion rates are much higher for mobile customers than for desktop customers – if you direct your ads at the right audience, you’ll make a lot of money. For best results use a professional mobile marketing agency.

• If you have a brick-and-mortar store, feature in-store special deals. You can use your blog posts, social media profiles, and newsletters to spread the word about your in-store deals. You want to use deadlines to add a sense of urgency to your offers.

• Invest in Facebook ads. Facebook ads still remain relatively cheap compared to other similar kinds of online ads. And the exposure is tremendous. They should be one of your marketing priorities during this holiday season.

• Offer giveaways. You can do it quickly and easily through social networks, especially through Facebook. The giveaways don’t actually have to be products available for sale on your site. They can be items bearing your logo… T-shirts, coffee mugs, notepads, and the like.

• Sell gift cards. Many customers prefer to spend money on gift cards than on actual products. A gift-card is a safe choice for the undecided customer. A good reason why you want to enable gift cards: they’re easy to transact and manage, being usually redeemed only in January.

• Invest in local ads, both online and offline. Customers prefer to buy holiday gifts from local shops rather than big retailers. Make sure your marketing campaign takes into account local customers. Add your location to your keywords.

In the end, remember that to market effectively it’s important to use as many channels as you can, and to target the right customers. Try to understand what your customers want, and give them that.

Photo Courtesy of Flickr.

About the Author:

Kevin Gao is the founder and CEO of Comm100 Live Chat, a leading provider of live chat software for business. As a software developer as well as a small business expert, he’s always ambitious to revolutionize the way of online customer service and communication. Find Kevin on Google+ to find out more about him.