When you run a retail business, whether selling online, in a brick-and-mortar store, or a combined online and brick-and-mortar business, the holiday season between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day is where you move from the red to the black. Black Friday (the Friday following Thanksgiving) and Cyber Monday, the unofficial beginning to the online holiday shopping season, are important days for retailers. While you may notice that holiday decorations are appearing earlier and earlier in stores, as early as Halloween or even before, in an attempt to stretch the holiday shopping season even further, most people still do their holiday shopping from Black Friday until Christmas Eve, with the days between Christmas and New Year’s big for returns, bargain shopping, and clearances.
Preparing for Black Friday (or Cyber Monday) is not merely a matter of dressing up your store, or your online shopping cart storefront, with holiday trimmings. To be fully prepared, you should map out your marketing strategy well ahead of time, beginning in July or August, in order to capitalize on early shoppers and to get a jump on the competition.
Whether you run an online business, a brick-and-mortar store, or a hybrid of the two, an online optimized press release campaign can be beneficial in driving search engine traffic and publicizing announcements for the holiday season. The following will outline a strategy for thinking ahead and maximizing the potential for exposure and search engine benefit for optimized press releases.
What is an Optimized Press Release?
Though it is the standard industry term still, what a “press release” does is changing. In the past, press releases were created by businesses and sent to newspapers, magazines, and other media outlets in order to encourage journalists to write stories about new products, events, or services. An online optimized press release, however, is different.
Rather than depending upon the media to publish the content of the press release, businesses can now create optimized press releases and distribute them on the World Wide Web through paid services like PRWeb.com or free services like Free-Press-Release-Center.info. While the media still make up a large portion of the audience of these sites, and will occasionally pick up releases for writing stories, these releases are also distributed across the World Wide Web via RSS feeds, blogs, and search engines like Google® News, Yahoo!® News, and Bing™. It is a quick way to get an announcement out to the broader Web audience without relying on the media to translate the message for you. Including keywords that relate to your announcement, your business, and your site’s own search marketing efforts (SEO and PPC) is essential.
In addition, optimized press releases should contain links back to your business’ website. These links, especially from a site like PRWeb.com, are of great SEO value to your site, and will help your site appear higher in rankings for important keywords.
Using Optimized Press Releases for Holiday Promotion
Like many other kinds of holiday promotions, plans must be set in motion long before November in order to prepare for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday push. When running a press release campaign, it is good to run at least one release, maybe more, before the holiday season begins. This introduces your business to distributors, RSS feeds, and search engines, and lends an added air of credibility when issuing releases just preceding and during the holiday season.
Depending upon the size of your business, releases should be issued quarterly, bi-monthly, or monthly, in addition to when you have a big announcement. If you have releases that have garnered attention in the past, from search engines or the media, your name and business will be likely to attract more attention and stand out from the glut of releases and promotions just preceding the holiday season.
Also, issuing optimized releases regularly helps your site’s search engine rankings via backlinks. The more valid releases you issue, the greater the benefit.
Once you’ve begun your regular campaign, it’s time for the big holiday announcements. Know what your promotions are going to be at least a month ahead of time. We recommend creating a draft of your holiday release as early as October, so that you will have time to perfect it and make any necessary tweaks. Use keywords from your SEO or PPC campaigns in addition to holiday related keywords. Even though you are using this as a promotional tool, write it as you would any other news announcement—this will give it more credibility, and thus higher page placement, on distribution sites with human editors.
If you are stuck for an announcement, tie into the times. Link your product or promotion, using a clever hook, to a high-profile movie release or big trend as the holiday season approaches. A good example of this is a release for a company promoting anti-aging cream referencing the film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
You may be thinking to yourself, “I am too busy running my business to come up with a clever announcement for the holiday season.” That’s where the specialists at Network Solutions® come in. Let us work with you to develop a regular press release campaign and learn your business, and when the holiday rush hits, we’ll be able to help.