DIGITAL GUIDE FOR THE END OF THE YEAR

Black Friday marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season not only in the United States, but also in many other countries around the globe. As you may have already noted, each country has created its own version of this day that apparently only has commercial purposes. Here in Colombia we have just had Cyber Monday in the Criollo style with various participating brands and sale figures that continue to increase year by year, highlighting the increasing power of e-commerce.

To put it into context, certain figures from the Christmas season that begins this week suggest that Christmas sales will increase by 5.3% in the United States alone compared to last year in order to reach a total of $1.1 trillion, almost three times the economy of Colombia. For some businesses, this final season of the year represents 30% of their sales for the whole year, and finally the Christmas sales continue growing each year, with the world financial crisis of 2008 as the only negative year during the last 17 years.

With this in mind, note that if you are in business or a business owner, November and December are the most important months of the year. So, what to do about it?

VIDEOS

Christmas is the season of videos, especially if you want to sell a product. Look at these figures released by Google in 2017:

So, if you want to make the most of the great potential of video advertising, we recommend the following:

1. Use humour: include videos of your own characters, don’t take your clients too seriously, show your easy-going personality as a business.
2. Don’t go directly into the sale: take a more personal approach that makes it genuine. Christmas is also an excellent opportunity to show cultural diversity and create good relationships with your audience.
3. Make well-known references: this time of year permits allusions to songs and emblematic content. Just try to ensure that these also click with your clientele.

E-COMMERCE

Each year more and more Colombians are inclined to shop online without needing to waste time in queues to park, to pay, to eat, to take out money etc. And they prefer to do their Christmas shopping from the comfort of their own sofa, all of this long before Christmas Day to ensure the items arrive on time.

Ensure that your website is ready to receive lots of traffic and guarantee that your clients will be able to find your website on search engines.

Begin making an audit of the site that allows you to detect broken links and access problems. Try using the page yourself to check ease of navigation and load times because this year you can expect lots of visits from Millennials, 50% of whom use their mobiles to shop. Therefore make sure that your page responds well to all formats (computers, tablets and smartphones).

Support yourself with the following strategies for improving sales from your virtual store:

1. Make packages: group together certain articles into discounted packages. These days, buyers feel more hurried by lists of presents that are usually very long, and so they prefer to buy it all at once to ensure all the presents arrive in time for Christmas Day.
2. Sudden discounts: make discounts to launch on different dates of the season. If you use an email campaign that displays the different discounts, you will increase sales by 15% according to Shopify.
3. Use coupons: shoppers love discounts, no matter what form they come in. Make your clients more faithful by giving them discounts they cannot turn down, and give new clients a special welcome discount to ensure that they too become regular shoppers with your business.
4. Free shipping: every customer values free shipping. 58% of them will buy more items in order to achieve it and 83% of shoppers  are happy to wait more than 48 hours to receive the items if the shipping is free according to UPS in the United States.

CONTENT

Up to 80% of Christmas shoppers are influenced online before buying an item according to WordStream. But what exactly do they see?

Content!

Content is the best form of advertising to potential customers. And to achieve this, content must be well-written:

1. Avoid clichés: use new phrases, avoid “Happy Christmas” and “End of Year Discounts” at all costs. Make the most of the chance to be creative and don’t worry if it sounds a bit crazy or out of place, your clients will remember it for this.
2. Create a sense of urgency: the Christmas season only comes once a year, though we wish it could be two or three times. But because of this you must create a sense of urgency in your clients so that they take out their credit cards and buy your products.
3. Content from your own clients: if your clients leave reviews after buying your products, these can be used on your website to attract more and better clients. This comes to be even more important that recommendations, according to Bluecore.
4. Begin as soon as possible, prepare your business and think well about what it is that most interests your clients.

I hope that this guide serves to help some of our readers and that they understand that at Lanterna Pictures we can help them with video production for all formats. With dedication and excellent quality we can help you to ensure that your website or Instagram is not missing a great video to advertise your end of year promotions, your star products and discounted packages for your loyal and faithful customers.

We wish you all a successful Christmas and that the sales come flooding in.