How to Drive Website Traffic Over the Holidays

Here’s some breaking news: during holiday stretches like Christmas and New Year’s, offices around the country tend to be a bit more sparse than during other times of the year. Okay, so maybe that’s not so surprising.

It’s a great time of year, after all, for business leaders and their employees to travel or use remaining vacation time to be with families and friends. And while that’s great for those people, it can be a frustrating problem for B2B marketers charged with driving website traffic during a not so trafficked time.

A lot of marketers and businesses will chalk up poor results and lost productivity at the end of the year to the holidays, as a Boston Business Journal article pointed out in November. But for marketers, the last two weeks in December don’t need to be so dreary. There are a few ways to drive traffic through the holiday lull. Try these tactics next holiday season:

Post Your “Best of” Content

Evaluate the top performing blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, and any other content your company produced throughout the course of the year and repost them over the holiday weeks as a “Best of” series. Because the content resonated so well with your audience when it was originally published, it will likely experience similar results again. Great content is great content and selective readers (no matter how few they are) will consume it.

Compiling a “Best of” series will also help combat the lull in content production that results from a smaller than usual workforce.

Play Up a Holiday or New Year Theme

We did this with our OpenView newsletter. If you have a “forward to a friend” feature on your website or newsletter, play up the time of year by changing the wording to something like “Give the Gift of Ideas” or “Start the New Year on the Right Foot, Share with your Team Today.”  Our goal is to get the newsletter into the hands of as many expansion stage senior managers as possible. So by encouraging those who enjoy our content to share it, we are actively working towards that target.

Schedule Your Tweets

While you may be operating with less staff than usual, you can still have the same presence online. By using tools like CoTweet or Twaitter, you can schedule your messaging ahead of time, requiring less work on the days you are most understaffed. Remember, while fewer people are in the office, plenty of people still use the internet.

Be Sure to Market in Real Time

Regardless of what time of year it is and what kind of staff you have at your disposal, marketers should always market in real time. That means responding and reacting to noteworthy stories, particularly during the holidays. If a major news story breaks in your industry, write a blog post that reacts to it — and do it before any of your competitor’s can. News sources will be looking for quotes and reactions. The holidays may be the perfect opportunity to stand out from the crowd.

Your competitors may shut down their marketing operations over the holidays, but that doesn’t mean you should, too. In fact, you should work harder to take advantage of the quieter market.

On another note, real-time marketing isn’t just an opportunity, it’s a requirement if your business experiences any sort of PR hiccup during the holidays. As Michael Stelzner at Social Media Examiner writes, marketing in real time can be the difference between squashing negative publicity before it has the chance to gain momentum or succumbing to a negative social media firestorm.

Did you have you had a hard time driving website traffic during slow times?

Don’t worry, it’s a common problem for almost all marketers. The key point to remember is that the holidays may signal vacation time for your coworkers and employees, but it’s not a time to put your marketing efforts on hold. By preparing for that lull in advance, you’ll be in a far better position to market and drive web traffic that most of your competition.

Keep the above suggestions in mind as you go through the year, that way you’ll be prepared when everyone else checks out.