The holiday season is just around the corner but does your marketing need to hit pause too?

Here are a few tips to keep your online marketing working while you don’t. Yep you read correctly. It toils away doing all that you want, while you enjoy sun, sand, sea and, of course, the mandatory socialising.

Keeping in touch with those that matter is first up. By using email as the medium and any effective software solution as your tool (options for automation are aplenty). Let’s start with keeping your prospects updated.

Few sales people convert everyone they present to. To keep prospects thinking, how about a regular series of polite messages with a friendly gap between each and a sizable dollop of valuable content in them all? Nothing too wordy – just enough to keep them really thinking about your proposal as opposed to everything else that has since arrived on their desk.

Just staying in touch keeps you ahead of the pack. For “bonus points” and the bits to put you into the top 10%, why not also monitor who opens your messages and then further customise your content to suit those who are engaging a lot or very little. (For super bonus points, why not fire off a task to the sales person of the prospect when they click on a link and visit your website for a sizeable amount of time.)

Staying in touch with your customers over the break could be worthwhile too. Perhaps those who have purchased for the first time and need to be schooled in the hows and whys of what they have purchased. Again, small snippets of content with a way to track engagement is a smart way to proceed here.

Now let’s move up the sales funnel. What automation can your lead generation take? Google AdWords can help here. For instance, advertising campaigns can be built and scheduled to start or finish at predetermined dates to coincide with when someone is around to answer the phone.

You can also configure AdWords so that two search ads run against each other, with the winner picked based on its engagement performance. So while you sit back and enjoy the break, your advertising is getting smarter and smarter. Sound nice?

Another option is to let Google AdWords count people down to an offer that ends on a fixed date – for instance, shipping deadlines or Boxing Day sales. In each case, some recent ad copy automation enhancements could be handy. See the example below, which show some smart ways to incorporate this into ads. Set the date and let Google alter the ad copy until it ends, after which it will switch out the ad with another that’s best run when the date either ends or starts.

Remarketing is another “set and forget” piece of Google AdWords marketing that’s ideal for your holiday plans. A quick recap for those new to remarketing: This is where people arrive on your website and then either do or don’t do something that interests you. (Say they don’t purchase but do look at your latest online catalogue.)

By meeting certain criteria they are placed within advertising “audiences” which you then set up to be advertised to through banner ads placed around selected internet sites (like the NZ Herald or Youtube, for example). Once the rules are set up, those who qualify as your audience begin to see your banner based advertising without any involvement from you.

Finally, let’s talk about improving your natural rankings within the Google search engine while you enjoy the sun. Sounds great doesn’t it? Well, unfortunately this one is impossible. Improving your SEO requires deliberate work.

All I ask is if you want to change things here is that you spend a few moments of your well earned break brainstorming what new pieces of content you or your team can produce in the New Year. Sometimes hard work is the only way forward – and this is one of those situations.

BUT don’t forget the points I’ve raised here. There’s a good few in here that will keep things moving while you are are doing the opposite over the holiday period.

From all us here at Ark Advance, have a good break.