Starting today and continuing for the next several days (yet to be determined) we're giving you our concentrated action SEO, SEM, and mobile marketing action plan for the Holiday 2011 season.
Welcome to the Holiday 2011 Run-Up!
Last year's Run-Up presented a 9-part Online Marketing Plan; how many will be in this year's? We don't know yet because we're still putting it together.
The 2011 jWAG Run-Up will have the most recent search engine optimization techniques, best search engine marketing ideas, methods to improve your online catalogs, and mobile marketing ideas presented as action items to plan for and then execute on specific days of the holiday season.
BE WARNED: This is where we tell you exactly what to do so you have the best chance of winning sales over your local competing jewelry store. We're not going to guarantee results, but we're also going to say things like "do this or else" and "ignore us at your own peril" because we're pretty confident about our research.
The first action item is to add all your important product and services information to your website NOW! Do not wait until November or December because the search engines will not be able to index and include you in the SERPs in time.
The following Action Items should be completed by October 15, 2011.
ACTION ITEM #1:
By now you probably have a really good idea of the inventory you will be carrying. POST THAT ONLINE NOW! Get the product photos and 400+ word descriptions. Be creative and write 400 words. Within the descriptions include phrases like these:
"This is a good gift for mom."
"This is a good gift for your girlfriend."
"This is a good gift for your sister."
"This is a good gift for your grandmother."
"This is a good gift for dad."
"This is a good gift for your boyfriend."
"This is a good gift for your brother."
"This is a good gift for your grandfather."
A good rule of thumb for writing descriptions is to somehow convey the ownership experience. As an example, you could say "Book Lockets are a good gift for your grandmother this year. The Book Locket helps keep all the grandchildren close to her heart without any grandchild feeling left out. Give grandma an extra special gift by including photos inside the locket. Before you leave our jewelry store we'll make sure to show you how to put the photos into the book."
Use a description like that as the introduction, and then follow it with more details about the jewelry. Include the technical specs as a written format instead of formatted into a table. Include testimonials for that item, or previous purchase stories, or (dare we say) make something up! This is what marketing is all about.
You probably will not have time to do this for every item on your website, and unfortunately you might not even have the ability to edit your descriptions if your site is controlled by some 3rd party, like GemFind, Polygon or some other automatic upload scheme, in which case read Action Item #2.
ACTION ITEM #2
Create landing pages for specific products or suites of products. We always recommend adding pages for designer lines to your site instead of sending people to the vendor sites. The vendor information on your own domain name gives you more SERP visibility and less potential to lose a client to off-site linking and dealer locator searches.
Please don't get creative and use a pop-up window to link to a vendor site, or even the website frame or iframe technique to show their site within yours. The "frame" technique is especially evil since it's not supported in HTML 5.
Back to the specific action ... Gather a few photos of the products you really hope to push during the holidays. Put each item (or suite) on a landing page with descriptions and such as explained in Action Item #1. Link this into your product catalog to they can buy the item.
Odds are that you don't have online ordering, but you should link into the catalog anyway. Why? Because those links give Google another deep link into your site and because you want your customers to browse your catalog.
ACTION ITEM #3
Figure out who is going to be in charge of your website this year. Get them trained on how to update your website. Also get them trained on how to send emails either through your in-house method or through iContact, Aweber, Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, etc.
In our 2010 Holiday Run-Up, we listed 52 days that someone had to take an online action of some sort. That's 52 days between October 4th and December 31st. This is a full time job, so hire someone or reassign duties and do it soon.
