Another holiday is approaching. Many small businesses are wondering whether they should spend time and resources to launch Valentine’s Day campaigns. And, how should they drive more traffic to this campaign? And, should they get a chatbot to make the campaign more effective?
We know finding these answers is not easy. That’s why our seasoned TruVISIBILITY Sales Manager Steve Sunshine is eager to share his expertise and 25-year experience in this blog to make the life of small enterprises easier.
It’s our second time talking to Steve. Before, he already shared with us how businesses can liven up their marketing campaigns with a gift recommendation chatbot. This time we wanted to talk about how a chatbot fits into a wider marketing strategy for holidays and beyond.
Read this article if you are looking to:
- learn how to launch a holiday campaign
- learn to integrate a chatbot into your company’s marketing strategy
- set up more structured marketing strategies for any time of the year
- learn how professional marketing consultants can help your company succeed
Let’s get started!
Jump to…
- Is Running a Valentine’s Day Campaign Worth It?
- How to Build a Successful Holiday-Themed Campaign?
- Does Your Company Need a Professional Marketing Consultant?
- Over to You
Is Running a Valentine’s Day Campaign Worth It?
To answer this question, consider two things:
- How much revenue you can generate during Valentine’s Day sales?
- Does your business have any connection to Valentine’s Day theme?
First, let’s take a look at the market in the US.
Apparently, celebrating love in the 21st century isn’t cheap: Valentine’s Day in the US alone is worth $27 billion. This holiday, together with Christmas, Easter, and Halloween, is one of the dates when the most greeting cards and candy are sold.
But there is more:
The conclusion we can draw from these stats is that a Valentine’s Day marketing campaign is definitely worth the efforts! Just like any big US holiday, it’ll attract new clients, bring extra revenue, and drive more brand exposure.
Keep reading to learn how to launch a successful holiday campaign.
Now, what about your business?
Does your business have any relevance to potential Valentine’s gifts and activities? Even if you are not selling flowers or chocolates, remember that everything can become a gift! Coffee beans? Great! Domestic plants? Why not!
Also, you don’t have to target happy couples. Get creative and celebrate all kinds of love. Here is a couple of inspirational examples:
niLuu: Fall in Love with Yourself
niLuu, a brand selling sustainable, eco-friendly, and vegan kimonos and sleep accessories, encourages women to express love to themselves. Just take a look at this amazing commercial. Very forward-looking, considering a growing trend of self-love.
Hotels.com: Anti-Valentine’s Day
In marketing sometimes doing exactly the opposite is the most powerful strategy. For the last year’s Valentine’s Day, Hotels.com decided to target people who are willing to let loose some snarky comments about their exes. They invited people to explain why their ex deserves a stay in the Dumpster Hotel. The best explanation would get a $300 gift card!
Image courtesy: MailOnline
Funny, brilliant, motivating. Hotels.com managed to expose its site to people who weren’t ever going to use it. But now they might since they are aware of the brand, and they have a good impression of it.
How to Build a Successful Holiday-Themed Campaign?
If you are in a business, you most likely know the basics of how to set up a campaign. But Steve has a couple of aces up his sleeve that will help you run an amazingly effective holiday campaign. Or any campaign, actually.
Must-Have Components of a Holiday Campaign
Holiday-Specific Landing Page
You want to let users know right away that you are ready to meet their shopping needs for Valentine’s Day. Themed landing page will get users in the shopping mood and clearly communicate your campaign’s message.
Here is an example of a subtle design from Coach.
Image courtesy: Coach
Ads and Promotions
Of course, any campaign needs some sort of an ad or promotion, otherwise, your effort would just go down the drain. It’s important that your ads, just as your landing page and offer are aligned with your brand’s proposition and style.
Imagine Apple running a campaign with lots of hearts, 50 shades of pink, and all the extra Valentine’s memorabilia. Instead, they stick to their minimalistic image:
Image courtesy: The Apple Post
The Offer
Launching holiday campaigns just for the sake of flexing festive designs is not worth it. Your ads, promotional emails, and videos should clearly indicate what you are offering. Is it free delivery? A 50% discount? A special product? Give people a reason to explore your brand!
A Chatbot
An AI-powered chatbot is a great way to make your website more interactive.
“As compared to a standard web page that has a fixed amount of content, and is a quick read for the visitor, a chatbot is more effective. Usually, people read the top of the page and they see if it's for them or not. Then, they bounce to another page with a chatbot. If you hook them in with engagement of interaction and conversation, they can keep going as far as they want to go inside the chatbot”, says Steve. “The normal time a visitor spends on a page equals seconds. But the normal time they spend in a chatbot can be 5, 10, 20, 30 minutes of time because you're responding to their direct needs whereas a website is very passive and static”.
If a chatbot is already a part of your marketing strategy, don’t hesitate to use it in your holiday campaign. If you don’t have a chatbot just yet, use this holiday campaign as a chance to integrate it into your marketing efforts. TruVISIBILITY Chat is there to make things simpler than ever before.
Life After the Holiday
During the holiday season, you are likely to attract loads of new visitors and subscribers. How to make sure they stick with you, become your clients, customers, or brand advocates? Think about:
- collecting contact information of new visitors so you could market to them in the future
- collecting feedback from newcomers for future improvements
- setting up an automated loyalty program to encourage referrals
- collecting product reviews, testimonials, and other user-generated content
Know Who You Sell to
We asked Steve what the right way to target a Valentine’s Day campaign is and how to choose the right language and designs.
“The key with advertising and campaigns is how you are reaching people. Do you have a way to reach people specifically? I have a way, for instance, to reach people aged 20 to 40 through social media. I'm gonna advertise to them. I don't know how to reach people aged 50, for instance. 20 years ago, you'd advertise in sports illustrated to get the man and you'd advertise in Cosmopolitan to find the women. You had very clear channels to reach audiences. So now you can use the Google and Facebook advertising targeting to reach custom audiences.”
According to Steve, knowing your audience is the most important part of any business marketing strategy.
“Say I am looking for a gift for my wife. I would respond to an ad that is talking right to me, a husband looking to give something for his wife. And another person has a product that's perfect for husbands to give their wives. In this case, I would want to advertise that, have a landing page for that, and keep husbands in that funnel or closed box, not to distract them”.
Connect with Your Audience
Often shopping is like love at first sight: you get an instant connection. Here is Steve’s advice on how to make people fall in love with your brand.
“If someone is thinking Valentine's day, or they're thinking New Year's Eve, or they're thinking Christmas and they come to your site and get that vibe from your promotions, graphics, wordings, chatbot, they're gonna get in the mood of shopping. Now visitors’ walls are broken. Like when you go into the stores around Christmas, everything looks real festive, because they want to keep you happy and in the mood”.
“On the contrary, if someone comes to your site and they have Valentine's Day on their brain, but they don't see any connection to any Valentine's imagery, Valentine's promotion, Valentine's products, they're not gonna immediately get the connection and say, I found the right spot to shop.”
Chatbots, as Steve says, are perfect for establishing this connection.
How Can You Drive the Audience to Your Chatbot?
Let’s say you’ve launched the coolest campaign in the world with the most advanced AI chatbot. How do you get people to actually use it?
“You have to start training your customers. Hey, Mr. Customer, while we're not here on the weekends, we have built Bob the Chatbot to answer 98% of your problems of using our product. Please check it out”, says Steve.
Launching a chatbot is similar to launching a new product: you want to promote it on your website, in your newsletter, on your social media, maybe even run an ad. Don’t be shy about this new technology!
However, old habits die hard. Many people may be unwilling to engage with the chatbot, they will keep calling or emailing, and eventually, the chatbot will end up a waste of time and money. Is there a way to fix it?
“Yeah. It takes time and not everything is solvable for every person. My wife, for example, always calls. She doesn't type fast. And she feels intimidated by the technology. So, she has magic on the phone, person to person. She gets whatever she needs because she knows how to work the phone, but she's starting to do more and more online banking and online things. It takes time, not everybody is suited for everything. So there are customers that will never use your chatbot will never buy online. They'll only go to your store. You have to respect that. You can't force anything down anybody's throat”.
Steve believes that it’s important to give people time to get used to your new tools:
“You have to say: “Look, this is a tool that is available to you. It's easy to use. It takes seconds. We have hundreds or thousands or millions of people using it.” When you're ready, here's a how-to video, here's an introduction text. Here's a simple way to understand it”.
Constantly Monitor and Update your Campaigns and Chatbots
For the chatbot and the campaign to work successfully, it’s absolutely crucial to not, as Steve says, “set it and forget it”.
“Too many companies are making this mistake instead of continually tweaking and making the conversation better”.
The beauty of chatbot software is that it provides you with a set of analytical tools to monitor how successful your chatbot is and where your sore spots are. Here is an example of how TruVISIBILITY Chat monitors chatbots. Everything is available on a single dashboard!
According to Steve, constantly improving the chatbot is what makes the difference between professional and amateur marketing:
“I need to monitor what people are doing. Does it match what I expect them to do? and if they're not doing what I expect them to do, then what are they doing? And how can I help them further? That's the professional marketer. That's the difference between a small business that sets their website, their chatbot, their marketing strategy and says: “it's good. I did a good job. That’s it” and a business that takes their marketing seriously.”
If chatbot software is such a great tool, why do small businesses abandon it after they set it up?
“There are two reasons.
One: they don't have the resources. For a small company to create a new campaign every week takes 5, 10, 20 hours a week of a lot of effort and pictures and copywriting and graphics and programming and technology to put it on.
Of course, there is a solution to this. A tool like TruVISIBILITY makes it a lot easier. You can cut a lot of your resource time down.
Two: businesses are just not aware of good conversational marketing practices. They are mostly novice people. They understand baking, cleaning services, bouquet making, or whatever their craft is. But they don’t understand online marketing, what the trends are in online marketing and what consumers are reacting to. That's the job of professional marketers and companies like TruVISIBILITY”.
Does Your Company Need a Professional Marketing Consultant?
This question can have a positive answer in 3 cases:
- You have no idea how to market your business
- You don’t have the resources to hire an in-house team
- You are already doing your marketing, but you want to improve the results
According to Steve, hiring a marketing consultant is like fixing your car:
"Say you have to fix your car yourself, probably you can change a tire, but you can't fix something in the engine. In this case, you go to a professional. They're gonna tell you what to do or they will do it for you. Just like professional marketers, consultants, companies like TruVISIBILITY.
TruVISIBILITY knows what to do based on monitoring, being involved in the industry every day, following the trends, trying and failing, trying and succeeding, testing various practices over years and years”.
Marketing Consultants Make Sure You Are On the Right Track
What Do Marketing Consultants Do that Small Businesses Can’t Do?
“They keep up on the latest trends by reading and researching. Companies like TruVISIBILITY have the power and the resources to understand what customers are doing, what they want, and how to guide them in the right direction.
Industry standards, norms, expectations, you have to understand them. And they're constantly changing on what works and what doesn't work.
For example, today all that some companies want to do is get my email address. They don't want to give me anything. They don't want to tell me anything. They just want my email address. They figured out how to cheaply send a hundred emails to me over and over again. And they don't care if I get mad or anything. They just hope one day I buy something from them".
"It is a way that worked 10 years ago, but it no longer works”.
Over to You
We hope that after reading this blog you have a basic idea of how to launch a holiday campaign or actually any marketing campaign. Of course, in practice, it will require much more work, and maybe the best way for your business is to use a dedicated marketing toolset or hire a consultant.
TruVISIBILITY is always there to help your business succeed. Steve assures us: “TruVISIBILITY’s marketing tools stay in the front of marketing trends. Conversational marketing is a cornerstone of the TruVISIBILITY platform with our AI technology chatbots.
We're not building our business on tools that you needed 15 years ago because the industry and the people have moved past the basics.
We see the technology that's needed for years to come”.
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