“So deeply enmeshed are commerce and the calendar in American culture that most holidays would be scarcely recognizable without the trappings of the market.” – Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays by Leigh Eric Schmidt
People go to the market to purchase the things they need to properly celebrate festive days. Usually this means buying traditional items like pumpkins for Halloween, turkeys on Thanksgiving and fir trees at Christmas. But once shoppers are in store and shopping, why not try to raise cart values by offering discounts and promotions on other items as well? Companies often leverage holidays to encourage more spending. Several years ago, Sears used Halloween as an opportunity to promote their athletic gear. And Thanksgiving and Christmas are deeply linked to a rise in spending, with online commerce facilitating a bigger percentage of that spending every year.
This is a topic we’ve covered widely, so as the American holiday on July 4th approached, we anticipated some exciting online promotions. However, when we began hunting for these cyber deals one week prior to July 4th, most of our findings were focused on traditional physical goods like grilling equipment and party supplies.
Beginning July 1st, however, we began noticing more and more star spangled advertisements appear on the Internet through a variety of channels. Some of those ads came through email and some through search. Some were on social networks and some were even offered in-app.
Email is a big revenue driver and should be used to bring attention to your holiday campaign. Laplink, maker of a PC migration tool, used an intriguing subject line (3 Days Only – 4th of July Blowout Sale!), star spangled design and a 50 percent discount to entice their audience to purchase their products.
Search
We used Google to search for “Independence Day deals” or “July 4th deals” and found that Amazon, Walmart and Target all offer special sections on their websites devoted to the Fourth of July. However, there was not a strong presence of software products being promoted on these sites or in the initial search results. I would argue that software vendors can ramp up their PPC efforts in marketing to consumers around special calendar events.
Social
As with the search results, we found little activity on the part of software companies that engaged their audience during this American holiday. Other than the New York Times offering a 50 percent discount on Facebook, we realize that this is another untapped channel for software vendors.
One encouraging thing we noticed was the promotional activity on Google+ this year, which has not seen much in the two years since its debut. Though these updates were from physical product companies like 1800Flowers, they highlight the value Google+ brings to businesses, even digital product companies.
In-App
Probably the most interesting July 4th promotion we came across was the in-app offer from Nitro PDF. The idea here was to offer free users an opportunity to upgrade to the professional version with a 30 percent discount for the holiday weekend.
SaaS
SaaS/Subscription companies like Salesforce and Allrecipes.com focused less on generating revenue and more on engaging with their audience. For example, Allrecipes created an entire section devoted to holiday recipes which we are sure drove a lot of traffic to their site.
Salesforce on the other hand did not use the holiday to talk about their business in a direct way at all. Instead, they focused on the holiday itself and asked people how they were going to celebrate.
Keystone
People think of the winter holidays as the best time to offer discounts and promotions to shoppers. But even minor, non gift giving holidays can be used to market to customers in an effort to increase revenues and customer engagement during what is traditionally a slow time of the year.
Hi Elan,
There are some great examples there and I would offer a couple of concise points:
1. Just because the holiday isn’t a revenue generating one (like Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc.), use it as an opportunity to create the feeling of timeliness in your promtions/advertising campaigns. I like what Salesforce did in this example.
2. Companies that ignore Google+ will be sorry in retrospect because Google has publicly stated that they are leveraging G+ information in their search results. This is original content that Google now places higher than any other single factor!
Happy belated 4th and an early Happy Bastille Day!
craig.
Google+ is great and I think your point about it’s influence on search results is important. I don’t think it rivals Facebook as the place to connect with your friends, though Hangouts certainly gives it the potential to. Additionally, the site’s combination of search and social make it valuable for businesses which gives it ammo against LinkedIn. Ultimately, the winner is going to whoever drives the most traffic and revenue.