It’s that time of year again. The Halloween decorations have come down, radio stations have begun playing Christmas songs. And your holiday campaign checklist is starting to resemble Santa’s Naughty or Nice list.
Christmas is Coming
At Bluetrain, we know how important it is for retail businesses to make the most of the holiday season. The holidays bring a boost in sales and a chance to enhance brand awareness. They also offer an opportunity to forge emotional connections with your customers, both in person and online.
More people than ever are going online to browse for gift ideas and check in-store product availability. Deploying a robust digital marketing strategy is no longer optional but essential.
87% of holiday shoppers in surveyed markets said they used Google to help with their shopping.
Google-commissioned Ipsos Holiday Shopping Study, Oct. 13, 2022–Jan. 4, 2023
Paid Search vs. Organic Search
As exciting as the holidays can be, it can also be overwhelming to figure out the ideal marketing plan. With so much to do, it’s tempting to opt for a simplified strategy. Almost as tempting as a plate of freshly baked sugar cookies. The reality is, though, that a combined approach yields far better results. Combining both paid and organic tactics is more effective than using either method alone.
Think of it in terms of adopting a healthy lifestyle. We know that in order to reap optimal health benefits we need to exercise regularly and eat a well-balanced diet. We can do one or the other and realize some health benefits, but we won’t start to see real results until we do both.
The same goes for marketing. To achieve optimal business results, marketers need to adopt a holistic approach that includes both organic and paid search efforts.
So, what does a holistic holiday campaign actually look like?
First off, let’s quickly review and compare each strategy.
| Paid Search | Organic Search | |
| Definition | Paid search advertising (or pay-per-click advertising) refers to the ad listings that brands have paid to have displayed at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). | Organic search refers to the unpaid listings that appear on search engine results pages, which have been chosen by the search engine’s algorithm due to their relevance to a user’s query. |
| Key Benefits | Faster results: Paid search allows you to start seeing results (traffic, leads, sales) as soon as your ad campaign goes live, compared to organic search which takes longer to start delivering results. Page One Visibility: With paid ads, you can give your brand pride of place at the top of Google’s first search result page, without competing against other companies for those coveted Page One rankings. Precise targeting: Home in on your ideal customers with precise audience targeting options, such as age, gender, geographic location, interests and more! | Cost-effectiveness: Unlike paid search where you pay per click, organic search is free. Though good SEO does take time and effort to set up and maintain, the long-term return on investment potential makes organic search a highly cost-effective strategy. Credibility: Users tend to trust organic search results more than ads, which can enhance your brand’s online reputation as well as your ability to convert visitors into customers. Long-term Results: Although it can take time, once established, organic search efforts often yield benefits for a longer period than paid ads, which stop producing results as soon as your ad budget is used up. |
| Tactics | • Pay-per-click ads (ppc advertising) • Display ads • Social media ads | • Organic SEO Strategy • Blog post & Social media content • Email marketing |
As you can see, there are pros and cons to both paid and organic search, but by combining tactics you can maximize their benefits while mitigating potential drawbacks.
Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of combining organic and paid as well as some examples of how you can incorporate both tactics into your holiday marketing campaign.
Key Benefits of Combining Organic & Paid Efforts
Increase Visibility & Enhance Audience Trust
When your brand appears in both organic and paid listings, you not only double your brand exposure, but you give users multiple ways to engage with your business. Relevant, high-quality content also enhances the credibility and online authority of your brand, allowing users to feel more confident about clicking on your ads and engaging with your website.
Keyword Research-Driven Ads & Content
Get more from your keyword research by designing your ad copy, landing pages, and web content around key search terms that you want to rank for. By doing so, you can ensure that each channel works in tandem with the others, providing users with a consistent brand experience and increasing your chances of converting them into customers.
Reduce Ad Budget & Improve Conversion Rates
Without a doubt, the key to a successful ad campaign lies in a strong Quality Score. As you may already know, Quality Score is Google’s way of evaluating the quality and relevance of your keywords, ads and landing pages as they compare to other advertisers. A high-quality score not only enables you to rank higher in search engine results pages, but it also means that you will pay less per click than an advertiser with a lower quality score.
A high-quality score can be achieved by paying close attention to the intent behind user search terms (as revealed by keyword research), writing ads and content that support that intent, and applying the principles of SEO to your landing pages to ensure they are optimized for conversion.
Another great way to improve click-through rates and stretch your ad budget further is with retargeting. Users who have already engaged with your well-written, informative content will be much more likely to click on your ads, thus allowing you to improve your ad’s position and lower your cost per click.
Examples of How Organic Strategy Can Support Your Holiday Ads
Now that we’ve covered some of the main benefits of combining paid and organic search, let’s go over some examples that will keep your ad budget jingling this holiday season.
SEO-Driven Blog Content
Keyword research in hand, find the search terms that imply strong user intent like “holiday gift ideas for mother-in-law” and write blog articles and landing pages that support that intent. By writing engaging blog articles that address specific needs uncovered by your keyword research, you can capture organic search traffic and then use Google Retargeting to show your ads to those who have already interacted with your blog.
Social Proof & Engagement
Create compelling social media content to build holiday excitement and validate products. This will prime your audience for your ads and convert them into customers more readily.
Email Lists & Identity-Based Marketing
Use paid ads to funnel users into your email marketing list so that you can continue to nurture those relationships in the future. Do this by making email sign-ups the primary call to action on ads or by including a subscription button/field on your landing page.
In addition to creating an avenue for regular communication with customers that will keep you top of mind, you can also upload your growing email list to AdWords, Facebook and LinkedIn, and serve these customers highly targeted ads.
A Christmas Campaign Story
Here’s another real-life example of how paid and search can be used in conjunction to create an impactful holiday campaign.
Last year Bluetrain helped a well-known whisky brand get ready for the Christmas gifting season by working with their paid ads team. And as we all know, Google Ads Christmas campaigns boost holiday sales. Our organic search team focused on building out content specifically around gift packs and holiday gifting solutions. This included creating new gift categories, subcategory pages, and optimising the content to rank for popular search terms like “whisky gift sets” and “gifts for whisky lovers.”
We started this work in the summer to ensure that by the time their holiday ads launched they were already ranking well organically. This not only improved their Google Ads Quality Scores, but also helped them outrank competitors who hadn’t laid the proper groundwork and were relying solely on paid budgets to compete. It also ensured customers could easily find exactly what they were looking for after seeing the brand’s social campaigns promoting whisky gifts.
The Bluetrain Team: Your Digital Marketing Elves
Like Santa & Rudolph, paid and search are a dynamic duo that can’t be beat! By combining the best of both worlds, you can improve brand visibility, enhance user trust and engagement, optimize ad spend, and convert holiday shoppers into new customers.
Ready to get started with a holistic marketing strategy? Trust Bluetrain’s digital marketing elves to help you deliver truly magical results.
Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash