Christmas is almost here, and marketing teams across the globe are ramping up their marketing efforts to connect with customers over the festive period. With this in mind, Adext, an AI ad enterprise, has published a series of innovative and creative tips and strategies to help brands drive engagement during the next two weeks.

First, Adext recommends using every content marketing avenue available to inform, educate and entertain in the run-up to Christmas. The team at Adext believe any medium or format can underpin festive campaigns, from infographics and videos to podcasts and e-books, if it provides some additional value to the end reader or viewer.

It is obviously best to tailor creative content towards the Christmas theme, so try to think of ways that a product or service could help a consumer on the big day. Including a call to action at the end of an article or blog piece that clicks through to a product can also drive sales. Finally, optimising content for search engines and publishing it across social media will maximise the reach of high-quality resources.

Digital marketing agency PMX Agency has also outlined a few tactics and recommendations to help smaller and medium-sized brands to remain competitive during a time when larger online behemoths such as Amazon usually garner the greatest amount of mindshare with consumers eager for tech bargains.

Toni Bix, Group Director at PMX Agency, again notes that longer forms of editorial content are best, as more than two-thirds of search traffic is long-tail, which is defined as keyword phrases with three or more words. However, many brands still optimise content for solitary keywords or very short phrases. Bix recommends thinking about phrases that consumers may use during the festive period, such as searching for gift ideas or exploring products.

Providing a rich brand experience on websites is also important, and consumers are eager for compelling storytelling around the products and services they are looking for. To supplement these with creative articles, brands can also publish a few “how to” pieces and FAQs to answer questions consumers are likely to be asking, which will increase trust.

Perhaps most importantly, brands should attempt to make better use of data and analytics to provide the content consumers not only expect but demand in the digital age. A report published by L2 Inc this week found many brands still fail to collect data points, including age, gender and birthday, which is leading to irrelevant content and ads.

L2 Vice President of Intelligence Evan Neufeld said: “Very few brands effectively deploy data on a consistent basis. The truth is that brands may never achieve the perfect system for storing and using consumer data, but they cannot let perfect be the enemy of good. Incremental data improvements pay major dividends in terms of personalized marketing and meeting the rising tide of consumer expectations.”

By following these trends and tactics, brands and marketers can not only improve their campaigns for Christmas but also give themselves a head start on the competition as they look to 2018 and a new year of content strategies.