Memorial Day Marketing by the Numbers
Memorial Day is about more than using a day off to BBQ on the beach with friends and family. This historical holiday, honoring those who have died in battle, can be traced back to 1866, although it wasn’t made a federal holiday until 1967. In the 50 years that have passed since its inception, Memorial Day has become a driving force of many holiday marketing strategies. Let’s break down Memorial Day marketing by the numbers and see why how it has become such a crucial day to summer holiday marketing.
Time to Travel
We all know that summer holidays mean travel plans. In fact, 39% of us take a trip around Memorial Day. Your brand can capitalize on this trend by offering incentives and discounts for travelers. Try sending an email or SMS campaign inviting your recipients to interact with your content and extending a discount to be used on the holiday. The contact will help build rapport with your customers and showing that you’re keyed into their travel plans will make the contact feel personal. Be sure to use interactive content of some kind: a poll, quiz, GIF or Zembula Experience, to grab their attention and stand out in the inbox.
Don’t Diss the Discount
Most marketers know that nothing grabs a consumer’s eye like a steep discount on quality products or services. While interactive content and personalization can help boost open rates for Memorial Day campaigns, recipients are used to seeing discounts of 20-90% on home goods and spring clothing. This sales frenzy will be hard to beat if you’re not offering a deal of some sort surrounding the holiday. One great way to deepen consumer relationships while offering the customer real-world value is to incentivize their participation in a survey or loyalty program by gate-ing their discount behind interactive content. Once they participate, you gain data and they gain access to the discount being offered.
Make the Most of Memorial Day Spending
As a holiday that has become synonymous with the discount, Memorial Day carves out a sizeable chunk of shopper’s summer holiday spending. According to reports from The U.S. Travel Association, consumers nationwide are expected to spend a total of $12 billion this Memorial Day. Ensure that your brand has an interactive campaign planned to capture your share of that spending. By interacting with customers on social media or in their inboxes, you’ll remain top of mind this Memorial Day. No matter what you sell and no matter if your brand is composed of e-commerce or brick and mortar locations, you can benefit from a Memorial Day campaign! Try sharing an interactive experience GIF on Twitter or Facebook and watch the engagement roll in.
Beef up Brick and Mortar Preparations
While Memorial Day can be a good marketing holiday for any type of brand, it becomes especially important for retail stores with brick and mortar locations. In fact, you can expect to see a 73% increase in retail traffic over Memorial Day weekend. That huge jump in volume means your physical storefronts need to be ready to accommodate the surge of shoppers. Make sure that your display ads onsite accurately represent your holiday sales and use this as an opportunity to gather data from your shoppers, like emails or phone numbers for your future marketing efforts. Offering a small discount at the point of sale can be an effective method to incentivize shoppers to share their data with you.
As the statistics prove, Memorial Day kicks off the beginning of summer and signifies the start of summer spending. Ensure your brand doesn’t get left behind by planning ahead for a Memorial Day campaign! Keep your content relevant and interactive to foster engagement and make the customer feel like they’re establishing a personal connection with your brand. Keep your eye on spending trends and market with holiday travelers in mind to stay extra-relevant. Most of all, make sure you leave time for yourself to enjoy a nice BBQ with your family or friends!
Nicole Cordier is a Marketing Intern at Zembula. A Journalism graduate from the University of Oregon, she is a Portland native who loves coloring, dogs and all things outdoors.
Side Project Marketing: How to Make it Work For You
You might have recently started hearing the term “Side Project Marketing” floating around some of the bigger name blogs in the last year.
If you haven’t seen it before, let’s start there. Here’s a definition:
In it’s most basic sense, side project marketing is basically a hybrid between content marketing and advertising. Brands are starting to do this as an interesting additional alternative (not instead of) to their conventional marketing plans to provide something that adds additional value to consumers.
In other words, brands are creating side projects that are actually giving away lots of valuable content for free, with the goal that later on they will be able to sell a related product or service to these very same to potential customers.
In this post, we’re going to look at a number of brands that created side projects that not only became pretty successful on their own but also helped drive a ton of traffic and customers to their products and services. Plus, we’ll look at some of the major lessons that they learned. Finally, we’ll cover a few tips you can use to start featuring your own project .
Unsplash
Let’s look at a very good example to highlight this in action.
Lots of people today need photos for their websites, social media, and brochures (just to name a few). But, the old standby of using stock photos has become less and less appealing. People and brands wanted free high-quality photos that they could use in marketing, without the stodgy and posed feeling of stock photos.
Enter, Unsplash:
The idea was incredibly simple. Create a Tumblr page that featured extra un-used quality photos for free.
It wasn’t long before Unsplash took off. Now, it gets over 11 million visitors a month and has become an incredible brand in its own right.
Now, what most people don’t know is Unsplash started as a side marketing project for a brand called Crew, a startup for people looking to create their own products and wanted design and development help.
Crew credit’s the creation of Unsplash with saving their startup, pretty impressive, right? But the biggest takeaway we can learn from this is that a side project can be quite small and low maintenance and still be incredibly successful.
Moz
One of the most popular sites out there for brands looking to gain knowledge in SEO and its impact on the digital marketing space is Moz. They’ve built a number of high-quality and extensive tools around SEO for companies to use, but they’ve also created a couple of side projects as well aiming to provide tons of value to potential customers.
In fact, if you check their website, under “free tools” you’ll see a ton of different side projects at work.
All of the tools here are completely free. Not only that, this plays right into the concept of the side project.
They add tons of real value to potential customers and, according to this post from CrazyEgg, the Open Site Explorer tool “has generated over 14,000 backlinks and generates over 8,000 visitors each month from organic search alone.”
So here’s another takeaway: top side projects keep the needs and wants of the customers in mind. All of the free tools that Moz provides offer nothing but value and usefulness to the exact people Moz would love to be their paying customers.
More Ideas
The two examples above are just a couple of side project marketing ideas that have worked. There are tons more out there.
Having a ‘grader’ is one big example. Hubspot’s own side project is a super simple tool that helps grade your website.
Here are a few more ideas you can try for your own brand:
- Courses
- Quizzes
- Roundups
- Podcast
- Newsletters
- Blogs
- Physical products
- Info products
- Forums
As you can see, pretty much anything can become a side project. It doesn’t have to be conventional, expensive, or mind blowing, it just has to be something that really speaks to your specific audience.
Next, we’ll take a look at a few of the best tips we can offer for success when it comes to side project marketing.
What About Creating Your Side Project?
So, if you want to create a side project, there are a couple of things you should keep in mind.
Create Something of Value
We already covered the idea of creating value for your potential customers. That’s really the key to this, don’t waste your time creating something that your ideal customers aren’t going to be interested.
Try to create something that actually solves a real problem. That’s where your side project marketing plan is going to really stand out. Because when you have something that is really valuable, it will likely last far longer than a blog post.
Find the Right Tools to Make it Easy
One of the big reasons why side project marketing has begun to blow up in the last year or two is because the time devoted to creating these projects has been really reduced because of available tools.
Just as Unsplash used a free platform, Tumblr, to get started, you can use things like Gumroad, SquareSpace and even Thinkfic to create simple sites, products, and courses.
Don’t Get Overwhelmed
The last thing you want to do, and the trap a lot of brands fall into, is take a ton of time, effort, and energy away from your actual brand and put it into the side project.
Remember, the side project is something that should be done on the side, that means it needs to be something that is relatively quick and easy to get done.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, there’s a ton of potential out there when it comes to side project marketing.
The brands that spend a bit of time brainstorming something that is relatively quick and easy to come up with that relates to their product or service and provides extra value to customers are going to see positive results.
In a world where attention is waning and the competition is growing more and more complex, creating a project like this might just be a golden ticket.
Has your brand created a side project? Share it in the comments!
