Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Flipboard 0 Gift guides are an important part of the holiday season. In a nutshell, these guides are designed to help consumers find great products. People spend on average $450 dollars a year on gifts for their loved ones during the holidays. There is a hidden market here, and all it takes to seize this opportunity is a high-quality gift guide. If you add a guide to your website you can boost your traffic and sales tremendously. You’ll be happy to know that you don’t have to sacrifice quality for results. We are going to show you how to build a professional guide that increases sales and gets you results. Know Your Audience Designing a holiday gift guide requires some serious thought before you begin. You have to decide who you’re writing this guide for and what kind of products they want to buy. We all spoil ourselves during the holiday season. Even if the guide is technically meant to display things to purchase for friends and family, your audience could buy one of your listed gifts for themselves. Carefully consider the central theme of your guide. Avoid vague titles like “10 Best Gifts for Christmas.” Instead, pick specific titles like “10 Best Gifts for the Tech Guru in Your Life,” or “5 Kitchen Gadgets Gifts Every Cook Needs.” The reason for picking specific titles is two-fold. First, the detailed title helps pull in an audience looking for very specific types of gifts. If they are looking for precise gifts in different niches, odds are, they are ready to buy today! If you give them a solid recommendation, they are more likely to come back to see you’re offering. (Targeted Gift Guide Example: https://www.medicineandmanicures.com/holiday-gift-guide-tech-gifts/) The second reason specific titles are important is that it helps people find YOUR guides. When you use long tail SEO keywords, your guides are more likely to appear at the top of search engine results. Speaking of SEO, here’s the second way you can create a great guide to boost sales. Use SEO Keywords All successful business owners use Search Engine Optimization(SEO) to boost the traffic to their website. Just because you’re writing a different type of content, doesn’t mean you should forget about SEO keywords. Use Google Keyword Planner to start looking at popular gift guide ideas, and market towards those keywords. You’re obviously going to want to dd a mixture of other keywords, but a surprising amount of people search for gift guides around the holiday season. If you can bring these people to your website, they are going to want to stick around and see what you have to offer. If you are on the first couple search results of Google, you are going to see a huge boost to your website traffic and sales. The best part about ranking high in the results for gift guides means you can drip feed keywords throughout the year and secure your ranking. As each year passes, you’ll be in one of the top spots for your chosen gift guide keywords. It’s very simple, better ranking translates to more eyes on your content and more eyes translates to better sales. Use Social Media & Email Marketing Marketing your gift guides is just as important as posting them to your blog. If your goal is to boost your sales, you should use the two main sources of marketing to reach as many people as possible. The best ways to market your gift guides are through social media and by emailing your lead list. The three big social media outlets are Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Facebook and Twitter are similar in the sense that you can post statuses or posts. As you finish your guides, make sure that you regularly share them on your profiles. There is also the Facebook Ad Manager and Twitter Ads available for you to market the content to specific demographics. Search for people that will be interested in viewing your gift guides based on the items featured, and promote the ad with your post to those people. Pinterest, on the other hand, is targeted around pictures.Feature the images from your gift guides on your Pinterest profile and make sure to link to the full guide from the image. If you’ve done your job and built an engaging list, they are likely to follow you, share your pins and article, and engage with your business. (Sample Pinterest Gift Guide: https://www.simplepinmedia.com/use-gift-guides-to-create-passive-income/) As your audience grow, so will your sales! Your social media marketing and sales go hand in hand. Schedule your gift guide posts and images with a great social scheduling application like Buffer. Email marketing is a little different. You should segment your email list and find people who are more likely to click-through and look at your guide. Build a targeted email campaign based on your audience or those who signed up for your newsletter, and send out an email with the guide or link attached. Between your email audience and your social media followers, you’ll find that there are plenty of people looking for awesome gift guides this holiday season! Create Detailed Descriptions The purpose of a gift guide is to do more than show the products off to the readers, they are also going to want to know why these gifts are great. If you can prove that you’re knowledgeable about the products you’re promoting, you are more likely to drive traffic and increase sales on your website. Pictures are great, but when you write awesome copy for each item you can really sell the product that you’re showing off. There are multiple details you should include in your guide. First, include a short description of the gift. Give a quick breakdown, perhaps in bullet points, explaining exactly what this item is and what features make it different from similar items on the market. After you describe the product, include a blurb about why this product would make a great gift. If it’s a product you own, you can even include your own experience with the product. Your description should explain what it is about this item that makes it suitable for this specific gift guide. For example, if your title was “10 Electronic Gifts for Tech Savy Loved Ones,” and one of your products was an Xbox One X gaming console, you might want to say “The Xbox One X is the perfect gift for the tech junkie in your life because it runs compatible games and movies in native 4K — a necessity for all the new games they’re going to get this holiday season!” Finally, double check all of your work to ensure that your spelling and grammar is correct. If you want that extra layer of security, consider using a spelling and grammar checker. Prepare a Post-Holiday Gift Guide Believe it or not, 65% of people continue shopping for gifts after the holidays are over. You should consider developing a post-holiday gift guide to bring in this large demographic. You’ll also have the ability to seize on some unique SEO keywords. If you’ve made the mistake of waiting until the last minute to build a post-holiday guide, don’t worry. You can put together a great gift guide in a hurry with the WeLaunch plugin. It’s possible to build the framework for your guide overnight. A post-holiday guide will bring in the late audience, and introduce them to your brand and product — potentially boosting sales. You have to be sure to tie these products to your brand and explain how they complement one another. There will be people who want to bundle together your product and the product advertised — seize this opportunity and catch the late bloomers with a post-holiday guide. Conclusion If implemented properly, buying guides can help boost your sales and bring in more traffic than ever before. The best part about using a buying guide is that the customers who come for your guides could stay for your great product line. Twitter Tweet Facebook Share Email This article was written for Business 2 Community by Syed Balkhi.Learn how to publish your content on B2C Author: Syed Balkhi Follow @SyedBalkhi Syed Balkhi is an award-winning entrepreneur and online marketing expert. He is the co-founder of OptinMonster, WPBeginner, MonsterInsights, and WPForms. … View full profile ›More by this author:How to Retain Your Best Customers (5 Powerful Tips)5 Content Marketing Mistakes that Need to Stay in 20214 Online Shopping Trends You Need to Know in 2022