The Spirit of Christmas and the Grinch of Relevance
Just because it’s Christmas doesn’t mean you have to cover your digital content with snow and Santa hats. Should you use Christmas in your digital content marketing?
It’s that time of year! Mince pies, turkey, presents, open fires, <insert generic Christmas symbol here>.
We’re not the bah-humbug types at Impressona. Far from it, we love Christmas. But when it comes to content marketing in Bristol and beyond, we’re sticklers for two requirements; relevance and intent (you’ll find them just behind Prancer and Vixen pulling the sleigh).
In nearly every editorial calendar, from the antarctic to Santa’s grotto, you’ll find Christmas shoehorned into the marketing plan like a square peg mashed into a round hole. For many content strategies, Christmas can work really well. Seasonal product businesses especially can use Christmas as a major boost to their marketing and sales plans. But there are also plenty of businesses for which Christmas is really not that useful from a marketing perspective.
Relevance and Intent
When you create content, or plan for its creation, two questions should be at the front of the queue. “Who am I aiming this at?” and “How will they find this content?”
Your content has to help your intended audience or answer a question they have. Failure to do this will mean your content has low engagement.
How can you find out what will engage readers? Head over to a site who attracts the same audience as you’re looking to create content for and see what performed well. What got liked, shared and commented on? Now do a quick bit of content marketing gap analysis and find a way to improve on what’s been done already.
Having made your content relevant to your audience, you need to consider intent. The intent is what they are thinking (or what they want) when they click the link to get to your content.
- Organic SEO driven links
The key here is what they searched for to return your content in the list of non-advertising based sites (or SERP results). Say they typed “How do I buy computer hardware online” and your article is all about “How to buy computer hardware at Christmas markets” you may have engaged them, but by shoehorning Christmas into your content, you’ve mismatched their intent.
If their query was “Is Christmas a good time to buy computer hardware” and your article focusses on how what amazing deals can be had at Christmas markets, then you’ve matched their intent with the relevance of Christmas.
In other words, if Christmas isn’t part of the genuine narrative of your content, don’t try to squeeze it in.
- Paid content and adverts
The intent here will be based on the content of your advert. Consider carefully if a Christmas themed message is the way to go. Adding a Christmas hat to your product shots might actually detract from the marketing message!
- Outreach content
Depending on placement, Christmas might actually get in the way. Remember with this type of content you can’t control distribution, so you might find people coming across your Christmas themed content in January (or even next summer, you just can’t tell) and finding that all that jolly festive messaging dates your content and misses the intent of the viewer.
Getting content marketing spot on
If you’re going to use Christmas in your content marketing, try to make it relevant (what makes your product or service shine during the festive season?) and engaging (who does the way people view or use your product at Christmas change?).
Consider this article. Our content marketing team in London have been busy helping clients get their content ready for Christmas. During this time we’ve been finding ways to make that content relevant and engaging for their target audience. We’ve noticed people searching for things like “how to add Christmas theme to my online marketing?”
Our service isn’t directly related to Christmas, but it does change how people use and view our service. This article seeks to capture that relevance and intent for the benefit of our audience.
If we’d made a video of Santa dropping poorly animated content strategies down random chimneys, it would have missed the point somewhat.
Anyway, enough work for 2019. You get off and enjoy your Christmas. If you want to chat content marketing in the new year, we’ll be ready and waiting. Merry Christmas!
