Driving Website Traffic Over the Holidays

It should come as no surprise that fewer people than usual are in the office this time of year. This can be a frustrating problem for B2B marketers who are charged with driving website traffic. Here are some tips for driving traffic through the holiday lull:

1) Post your “Best of” Content:
Evaluate the top performing blog posts, articles, videos, etc. from this year and repost them over the holiday weeks as a “Best of” series. Because this content resonated well with your audience during the year, it will most likely do the same over these weeks. This also helps to combat the lull in content that results from a smaller than usual workforce. We are doing this now on the OpenView Labs site.

2) Play up a Holiday/New Year Theme:
We are trying this with our OpenView Venture Partners 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 our 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 our target.

3) Schedule your Tweets:
While you may be working 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!

4) Be sure you are marketing in Real Time:
As marketers, we should always market in real time, such as responding and reacting to newsworthy stories. This is particularly important during the holiday time of year. If a major news story breaks in your industry, write a blog post reaction to it (and do it quickly!). News sources will be looking for quotes and reactions and this is the perfect time of year to stand out from the crowd. While your competitors may shut down their marketing operations over the holidays, you can stand out by being on your A game!

Have you had a hard time driving website traffic over the holidays? What has worked well for you?

Wishing you and your content marketing strategy all the best in 2011!