An admittedly cynical slant on Santa

Dear Santa,

I hope you are well and Mrs Santa too. This year I have been very good and would like a WiiTM, WiiTM accessory kit and additional WiiTM controller.

As per our usual deal, if you proceed to the kitchen you will find one mince pie and one glass of sherry (the bottle is in the cupboard above the fridge if you are having a rough night, just make sure there is enough left for Granny to have a glass after lunch).

Now, not to obsess too much about business but I have been considering your online marketing. I can see that brand awareness is high, particularly among the 4-12 years demographic, but you do not seem to make the most of your online potential.

Here are a few tips you may wish to consider.

Viral marketing

It is very easy to see the benefits of a viral marketing campaign but very difficult to do. This is where a marketing campaign works by encouraging recipients to forward on the messages.

To make it sound simpler than it is, you need to create something so interesting that people are compelled to send it on to their friends, family and loved ones. Maybe a voucher, humorous story, joke, novelty, that kind of thing.

In fact, novelties work especially well, just look at the success of Elf Yourself or the (admittedly less charming) MyGingerHead.com.

Christmas is a time for sharing, get folk to share your marketing!

Search engine optimisation

There are so many keywords you ought to rank highly for - Father Christmas, Santa, Christmas, present, elf.

It would not take a huge amount of effort to ensure you rank well; you are bound to receive a load of inbound links once the word gets out that the website belongs to the real Santa.

You could encourage such inbound links using the site’s content. The bona fide Naughty or Nice list would probably be quite popular among all ages, especially if you left politicians’ names on. A blog written by you and your elves would also go down well and be full natural instances of the words you want to rank for.

Perhaps you could have a section of the site where people review the top toys, games and gifts of the year. Articles on the top ten most-requested presents might also be interesting and would be likely to get a fair amount of media attention.

Pay per click advertising

You know those paid adverts at the top and side of the search results? Well, while your search engine optimisation campaign is getting up to speed, you can use paid ads to ensure you are firmly in the public eye for your keywords.

Ranking for these terms is likely to be a costly endeavour at this time of year but the great thing about pay-per-click (PPC) is that you can set limits for the amount you are willing to pay - meaning you do not have to worry about going over budget.

You may decide to keep your PPC going even once your organic campaign kicks in. These adverts will drive a high number of relevant visitors to your pages. Appearing in paid ads for popular keywords is also a good way of positioning yourself as a serious brand in people’s minds.

Online reputation management

There are a lot of companies marketing using your brand and I am not sure there is much you can do about it, it is a bit late to copyright your image.

However, you should take steps to shield yourself from negative press online. If bishops start telling kiddies you don’t exist or the New Forest Lapland’s fake Father Christmas lights up in the grotto, you need to make sure brand Santa remains unharmed.

Let me know if you’d like any help with the above. You are a busy bloke and may not have the elfpower to take care of this in-house.

Merry Christmas,
Stuart

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Online Marketing Tips to Give Santa a Merry Christmas!

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It happens every year and yet we’re so often not prepared.  We’ve planned the content, organised how it will be executed and yet still we don’t seem to get it done in time.  Optimisation for Christmas always seems possible in January and impossible in November.

Some obviously plan their optimisation well in advance, planning things out over the period of the year, ensuring various plans are executed at the most economic point in the annual cycle.  They have their strategy mostly mapped out, with some ‘wiggle room’ built in for last minute acquisitions at odd times in the cycle.

Others stick to a rigid, time-optimised plan, executing to strict guidelines within certain geographic regions with a very specific target market in mind.  These people are quite rigid in their approach and can react with hostility at the suggestion of increased flexibility.  Their budgets are pre-planned and schedules organised to the minute.

Still others will approach Christmas optimisation in a haphazard way, allowing the winds of whim to blow them here and there.  Lacking a strategy, their optimisation is rarely executed in any discernable way and to a certain extent despite spending more than they may have planned, the result is far less optimised than they had imagined.

I think I am a bit of a mix.  My approach to optimisation of Christmas is a small amount of advance planning, executing some parts at economically favourable points in the cycle but generally dashing around like a mad woman at various deadlines to try and achieve all my goals before the deadline passes.

I guess that’s part of the magic of Christmas – that I manage to get my gift buying done at all!