Every single year, countless billions are spent online during the holiday season. Savvy brands know and understand this ahead of time, and begin positioning themselves to take advantage of this months in advance. Many smaller and newer brands are caught like deer in the headlights when the holidays arrive, incapable of quickly pivoting to take advantage of the season. Unless you are a notable and multinational brand, there is a good chance that you will have to prepare a lot in order to be successful during the holidays. Today, we’ll review some strategies that can help you begin your plans for the holidays before it is too late to reap the benefits.

Identify Key Shopping Days

You may not know it, but people are already beginning to shop for Christmas and other winter holidays. The Christmas shopping season online begins in August, but many people are not aware of this. While you’re not likely to miss a lot of business in these early months, it is important to know which specific days throughout the holiday season are likely to generate many potential sales. Holidays such as Halloween, Cyber Monday, Hanukkah, Black Friday and others are huge boons for business if the business is prepared to attract customers and begins working in advance. You’ll want to be pinging URLs to search engines for these holiday sales at least a couple of months in advance of the actual shopping days, which is why it is so important to get an early start.

Target Specific Ad Channels

How exactly are you going to reach your target audience this holiday season? Will you be using organic methods, paid marketing efforts, or a combination of both? It is crucial to know in advance exactly how you’ll be reaching people, or else you will not be able to generate an adequate plan in time. Some online brands will be able to take advantage of organic ad marketing; others may use services such as Gmail Ads. You might decide to focus on keyword research and target customers through Google AdWords. Others will use a combination of organic and paid social media efforts to generate sales. There are many different avenues and channels through which to advertise: you should be working now on deciding which ones are worth your time and money.

Plan Out Your Content

You may be an online store-front, but unless you have one massive ad budget, you need something to generate interest in your products through your ad channels. Will you be using great email copy to attract users to your site? Are blog posts a better use of your time? Will you decide to focus on pinging URLs to landing pages via social media that help make your pitch? There are many different forms of content – articles, reviews, videos, emails, infographics – that can help pique interest in your brand and attract would-be shoppers to your website. Content is king, even for online stores, and as such, you should be considering how best to generate this content right now. In fact, many brands are already creating this content right now in order to be prepared for the holidays.

The key theme in holiday sales is being prepared. It takes months to properly position yourself to take advantage of the holidays, so it is best to begin preparing now. Have you already begun planning? If so, what have you done? Tell us about your holiday preparations below.