More than one in three holiday shoppers – or 62.3 million adult consumers – report they begin holiday shopping before Thanksgiving, according to new data from Mediamark Research & Intelligence (MRI).
Just 35% of holiday shoppers say they begin shopping between Thanksgiving and December 15, and 25% say they start their shopping between December 16 and 23, MRI’s 2008 Omnibus Recontact Study found.
Approximately 2% of holiday shoppers don’t begin their holiday shopping until Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. (exceprt from Marketing Charts)
So what does that mean for us retailers? Ya better get your act in gear! The 2008 holiday session is HERE!
Things to keep in mind when do your advetising:
1- Targeted ads are better than generic
2- Google adwords is not the only place to advertise
3- Social networks my be a key to advertising passive markets
4- Don’t forget Ebay and Overstock
The more target your ads can be the more chance that they will convert into sales. This means that if some one is looking up a product like a (Nokia N96 mobile phone) then you put those exact words in your AD and in the landing page that you send them to. The customer must feel that they are being led down the correct path to exactly what they are looking to purchase.
Google is a great place to advertise but for most beginners it is way to complicated and you can loose a large sum of your advertising budget quite quickly. (Google adwords Learning Center) Look at other ways to advertise. Yahoo has a good program (Yahoo Paid Search) MSN has one also (MSN AdCenter). These are only tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of 2nd tier search sites that offer great advetising options. Miva, Kanoodle, Ask are a few of them that I trust.
Social networks like Facebook, Bebo, Myspace and Friendster are just a few of the top social networks that are all the craze these days. (Just the other day a really good friend from my high school days found me on facebook, haven’t talked with him in over 10 years. ) So if so many people are there looking for old buddies why not advertise? Check out Cubics.com .
Last but not least is the Auction services, Ebay, Overstock and many others are here to serve you and your customers. You may have heard that Ebay just raised their prices on listing auctions and completed listings.
Yes this is true but never fear their is always a silver lining. You have many options to offset the costs by using third party services to list your items. Auctiva.com, Vendio.com, Inkfrog.com these guys allow you to speed up your listings and offer most of Ebays upgrade tools for free.
This season is going to be very very GOOD for online sellers. No one wants to drive when the cost of gas is still pushing $4.00 per gallon (USA) Im sure it is as bad or worse everywhere else. So get out there and SELL SELL SELL.
