With the holiday season only two months away, now is the perfect time to begin positioning your brand for the veritable onslaught of traffic and/or sales that will come in the fourth quarter. Many brands and businesses generate the largest segment of sales and/or traffic during the final 3 months of the year – but you must be well-positioned prior in order to enjoy optimal performance in this regard.

Now is the time to begin planning how to reach your consumers, clients and/or followers for this explosion of holiday activity. Waiting until the holidays arrive to plan is often too late: you need a game plan and you need such as soon as possible. Because of this, we’ll be looking today at what you can do to get ready for this year’s holiday shopping and sales season right now.

Identify Key Markets

Before anything can be done, you need to determine exactly which niches are ripe for the taking. For brands that only offer a specific focus of products or services, this can be a bit easier. For those offering a variety of different solutions, digging through the data to find the most opportune search engine and advertising niches requires considerably more work.

Ultimately through a lot of analysis, any brand should be able to determine which specific products and services should make up the core of their holiday sales season pitch. Whether you’re targeting search engines for organic traffic or using email marketing to reach subscribers, knowing what audiences want – as well as knowing which audiences are most realistic for you to reach – can ensure you’re not pinging noise at shoppers.

Make Sure Your Website’s Optimized

Given that many online businesses see the most sales – if not an outright majority – during the last 3 months of the year, making sure your website is up to the task is crucial. There are a variety of tasks you should complete prior to the holiday shopping season onslaught that can help maximize sales and improve performance.

First and foremost, make sure that your website can effectively handle a surge in traffic. It would be terrible if you actually succeed at attracting more shoppers but they are unable to even load your pages because of bandwidth or performance issues.

Likewise, making sure that each product page and the website itself is optimized for mobile devices is fundamental to performance. With more people than ever shopping via their mobile devices, neglecting their influence can quickly bring an end to your dreams of holiday blockbuster sales.

Create High-Conversion Landing Pages

While every brand and marketing approach is different, many businesses find success by targeting audiences with specific individual products. Whether it be through social media, email or search engines, creating customized landing pages for individual products being promoted can produce higher rates of conversions and sales.

Some big names in the shopping business can beam entire catalogs of holiday deals to shoppers who know and trust them, most online brands will just end up pinging noise at audiences if they do the same. Figure out which audiences are most likely to purchase in-demand products and create landing pages to correspond to your marketing goals.

The holiday shopping season is nearly here, but it’s not too late to begin planning. By focusing on promoting individual offerings, optimizing your website’s performance and ensuring key markets are identified, you can make the most of this year’s holiday shopping rush!