With the holidays just around the corner, marketers know a solid content strategy is vital to success during the busiest shopping season of the year. Following the 2012 holiday shopping season, Outbrain, a web content recommendation company, gleaned some very valuable insights that can easily be applied to the 2013 shopping season. What follows are their top three observations and key findings:
- The proportion of holiday content consumed on smartphones was 251 percent larger than it typically is for all other content. With the growing popularity of showrooming — the practice of comparison shopping using a smartphone sometimes even while being present in a brick-and-mortar store – this is not surprising. In fact, a recent PewResearch Center survey stated that during the 2012 holiday shopping season “28% of cell owners used their phone while inside a store to look up reviews of a product to help decide if they should purchase it or not”.
- Holiday content consumption went up by 136 percent during the late night hours of 12 a.m. to 4 a.m. This can likely be attributed to extended online sales and coupon savings beginning at midnight. This is consistent with a comScore study of spending on Cyber Monday by time of day. The study found that spending between the hours of 9 p.m. and 9 a.m. grew from 3 percent in 2010 to 12 percent in 2011. Outbrain found that the amount of spending between these same hours on Cyber Monday 2012 grew even more than in the two previous years.
- Holiday content was consumed 16 percent more often than non-holiday content on weekends during the 2012 holiday season. This is contradictory to what we know about content consumption during other times of the year as it typically goes down over the weekend.
Reference
Chan, Natalie. “3 Killer Content Marketing Insights for the Holiday Season”. Smallbiztechnology.com. 10/15/2013.
