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2015 Holiday Report, Part II: The Most Successful Marketing Strategies | January 06, 2016 (0 comments)
Merrick, NY—While the holiday season in 2015 brought mixed results to prestige jewelers, the overall year was solid for most. But getting good results took hard work, good planning, and effective marketing to stay top-of-mind in an ever more crowded retail environment.
In The Centurion Holiday Sales Success Index, we asked our respondents to identify which marketing efforts they believed brought the most return for their investment of time and/or money. Not surprisingly, more than two thirds (67%) identified social media as one of their most impactful marketing strategies. Within that category, Facebook was singled out as their medium of choice, with 39% citing it.
Television ranked second—and close to Facebook—with 37% of respondents saying their TV ads helped contribute significantly to their holiday success. (Editor’s note: respondents were asked to name all the marketing efforts they felt were highly successful; hence percentage totals will exceed 100%.)
Despite the proliferation of music streaming services, radio remains a valuable marketing medium for prestige jewelers: 31% said it was an important marketing strategy that contributed to their overall holiday sales.
22% of respondents each cited print and direct mail as top strategies for bringing in customers. Within the print category, local newspapers dominated.
Special events were the best attention-getter for 19% of respondents, followed by general digital marketing (including banner ads, Google Reviews, their own website, et cetera) for 15% of respondents. Billboards and email blasts worked well for 12%. And of course, many benefited from long-time relationships with customers, referrals, word-of-mouth, calling up best customers, and one even employed text messaging with great success.
It’s become an annual tradition for us to bring you some examples of your peers’ Facebook posts leading up to Christmas. This year, we looked at posts from jewelers serving on Centurion’s Retail Advisory Board. We saw a lot of great product, with a nice portion also promoting designers. We saw great use of hashtags (#) and we found a greater percentage than usual of companies who were using Facebook for marketing—in line with our survey findings—as opposed to not posting at all during the Christmas lead-up, a characteristic of years past. Everything is an evolution!
Check out the following posts to see what how your contemporaries enticed customers to come and shop:
