You can spend 10 months trying to fine tune your Google AdWords campaign, really learning the ins and outs of how to attract your target customers to your jewelry store, but nothing you learn is going to prepare you for the affect that the Holiday Season has on AdWords.
The Holiday Season is about gift giving, and the holiday gift giving mentality is different than the rest of the year.
As you are most defiantly aware, jewelry is the gift to give throughout the year when someone is celebrating a birthday or job promotion, to say thank you, or to cheer someone up. Jewelry is given during economic hard times as a way of saying better times will come and during economic good times to celebrate what you have.
However, even though the Holiday Season has religious celebrations at its core, gift giving can greatly overshadow that as the gift giver is driven by something more materialistic: their budget.
Buying jewelry as a gift for the holidays will be a little more sentimental than a gift certificate from Amazon.com. How does the gift giver go about finding the right gift of jewelry?
This holiday season might be the first time the gift giver has thought of, or been suggested, that they buy jewelry. The young gift giver has probably never set foot in a jewelry store before and they might be naïve about the price of gold.
On the other hand, the gift recipient might well be a connoisseur of jewelry. They might have a small sentimental collection, or an entire jewelry wardrobe. The recipient probably already knows the 4Cs and the difference between white gold, platinum, silver, tungsten carbide, steel, and titanium. Until educated by you, the gift giver will not know the difference between a CZ and a diamond, and they might not realize that there are different white metals, some precious and some junk.
But again, the gift giver is shopping on a budget. If their budget is $250 then they will likely spend $250 no matter what the jewelry is made from. This budget might be higher or lower than the recipient would spend on themselves, but those allocated gift budgets are much less flexible and the money will be spent in full.
Another motivating factor of the gift giver is time. The gift needs to be wrapped and ready for the holiday. If you don't have a jewelry selection in the $250 range on your website you will probably lose the sale. Naturally, you would prefer they walk in the store since you have other sales techniques to win the sale.
We need to point out something about the budget driven gift giver. This person needs to see prices on your website. If you're running AdWords to attract this type of person, then you need to have a product catalog with pricing. A holiday gift giver with a financial budget is probably also on a time budget, and they won't spend time visiting your store in person unless they've pre-educated themselves on your website.
Reality check: Yeah, we just said that someone would not waste time visiting you blindly without first visiting your website. The exception to this is when the jewelry store is located in a high volume foot traffic area. Many reports were published in 2011 which document this new reality. Google calls it the "Zero Moment of Truth," or ZMOT for short.
The topic of our next Holiday AdWords Nugget will be the proper planning of your own marketing budget. See you tomorrow!
