Effective local holiday marketing strategies for seasonal success

The holidays are looming closer, and marketers are well aware that this year’s marketing playbook needs a serious update. Inflation is tightening budgets, labor shortages are stretching teams thin, and supply chain hiccups are making “out of stock” signs all too common.

Sound familiar? Despite these hurdles, it’s worthwhile to note that it’s not all doom and gloom. These challenges also bring opportunities for brands to step up, stand out, and deliver exceptional experiences customers won’t forget.

Shoppers are looking for brands that get it. They want to shop with businesses that meet them where they are, adapt quickly, and deliver value at every touchpoint. Whether that means driving loyalty with hyper-personalized offers or rethinking delivery options to make life easier, local marketing seasonal success comes down to one thing: knowing your customers and showing up for them.

Let’s dig take a look at effective holiday marketing strategies built for enterprise brands and see how you can make this your best holiday season yet.

Connect with empathy in tough times

Economic challenges are reshaping how customers shop, spend, and engage with brands. Empathy isn’t just a feel-good idea—it’s a strategy that builds trust and loyalty. When you meet customers where they are looking, offering solutions that truly help, you create connections that last long after the holiday season.

Start by addressing their realities head-on. Shoppers are navigating tighter budgets. Give them tools and resources to make their holidays joyful without breaking the bank. Share content that’s genuinely useful, like blog posts about affordable holiday hosting tips or social media graphics with quick money-saving hacks.

Plan holiday marketing campaigns that highlight value-packed deals like bundles, free shipping, or rewards for loyalty program members. Share localized deals and offers on your brand’s local pages.

Cater to personalization

Personalization is another key to showing empathy. Customers want to feel seen and understood, so use data to craft tailored experiences. Dive into analytics to identify what different customer groups value most. Are they looking for discounts, convenience, or both?

Adjust your messaging to meet their specific needs. If someone abandons a cart, follow up with a gentle nudge and a discount. These personalized touches show you’re paying attention.

Leverage social media

Social media is a powerful way to make empathy come to life in real time. This is where customers share concerns, ask questions, and look for advice—and it’s where your brand can shine by engaging authentically.

Respond to comments and messages quickly, offer helpful advice, and highlight budget-friendly promotions in a way that feels approachable. Real-time engagement builds trust and makes your brand more relatable.

Pro tip: Want to dig deeper into how personalized marketing can elevate the customer experience? Check out our guide to personalizing the retail customer’s experience.

Adapt to your customers’ new rhythms

The rules of engagement have changed, and your holiday campaigns have to keep pace. Today’s shoppers are hybrid by nature, according to our 2024 Local search consumer behavior study.

Nearly half (48%) of local shoppers now prefer a mix of online and in-store experiences, up from 43% last year. Meanwhile, online-only shopping continues to rise, with 25% of consumers choosing digital convenience—a 7% year-over-year increase.

Brick-and-mortar isn’t out of the picture, but it’s evolving. Only 10% of shoppers are heading to stores exclusively, while 11% embrace buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS), a trend that surged during the pandemic and remains a favorite for its efficiency.

What does this mean for your business? Meet your customers where they are. Build seamless experiences that let them move effortlessly between online and offline touchpoints. Highlight hybrid options like curbside pickup and BOPIS. After Claire’s, a global jewelry and accessories brand, enabled the BOPIS attribute on its local listings (at applicable stores), nearly 13% of its income came from BOPIS shoppers.

Your local pages are critical to this experience, too. They should act as the ultimate guide for customers, offering up-to-date information, promotions, and easy access to services. Strong local pages don’t just improve customer experience—they also boost your SEO performance by driving more traffic and engagement.

Pro tip: Want to create local pages that work harder for your business? Our Local Pages Playbook breaks down the essential elements of high-performing local pages and shows you how to build an experience that converts.

Tap into your community

Big ad budgets are nice, but they’re not the only way for local retail stores to win. Community connection is your secret weapon for building trust and loyalty. It’s a strategy that scales well, too, no matter the size of your marketing team or resources.

Start by identifying the communities where your customers are already active. Whether it’s a local Facebook group, a popular subreddit, or a neighborhood event, being present and participating authentically makes your brand more relatable and trusted.

Look for micro-influencers—those with smaller but highly engaged audiences. They’re often overlooked by brands chasing larger influencer deals, but these niche voices can drive significant impact. Their followers trust their recommendations, and their content often feels more authentic.

Tools like Upfluence or GRIN can help you find them. Offer them exclusive access to products, special experiences, or affiliate deals to create a mutually beneficial partnership.

Sponsoring or partnering with local charities, schools, or community organizations is another powerful way to connect with your audience. This could be as simple as sponsoring a holiday food drive or teaming up with a community center to host a festive event. Make sure your support aligns with your brand’s values. Authenticity matters—customers can see through marketing that feels like a box-checking exercise.

Consider hosting community-driven events in each of your locations. Whether it’s a small workshop, a holiday-themed pop-up, or a co-branded event with another local business, creating in-person or virtual experiences strengthens connections. These events are opportunities to meet your audience face-to-face (or screen-to-screen) and create memorable moments that tie back to your brand.

You could offer free classes or demonstrations, such as a holiday craft workshop or cooking tutorial. Or, create an interactive experience, like a holiday trivia night or live Q&A session.

Pro tip: Leverage your Google Business Profile and Apple Business Connect presence to promote these efforts. Update your profile to highlight partnerships, community events, or local initiatives—it’s a free way to amplify your message and build local credibility.

Keep customers in the know

Nothing frustrates customers more than being left in the dark—especially during the holidays. Our data shows that a solid 31% of shoppers expect Google listings to deliver accurate, up-to-date details about your location, special hours, and services, surpassing the importance of even your website (28%). This makes your Google Business Profile more than a formality; it’s a cornerstone of your holiday strategy. Keep it updated with accurate store hours, special holiday deals, and answers to common questions.

But it’s not just about being found—it’s about being trusted. Responding to reviews promptly (ideally within 24 hours) signals to customers that you value their feedback. For multi-location businesses, managing this at scale can feel overwhelming. That’s where a well-organized reputation management strategy comes in.

Pro tip: Use tools and strategies to centralize your online reputation efforts, ensuring consistency across all locations. For more actionable insights, check out our guide on managing your online reputation at scale.

Deliver experiences customers remember

Competing with big e-commerce businesses doesn’t mean trying to outspend them—it’s about outsmarting them. The secret? Create memorable experiences that customers can’t help but share. Those moments don’t just drive sales—they build loyalty, turning shoppers at each of your retail stores into advocates for the brand.

Start by simplifying the online experience. Look at what major players are doing: bundling complementary products, streamlining checkout, and offering personalized recommendations. Then find ways to improve on their approach.

Add related product suggestions to your pages, make sure your curbside pickup process is seamless, and ensure your mobile experience is intuitive and fast. Customers notice the details, and these small wins can add up to a big difference in how they perceive your brand.

Testing is key. Use A/B testing to identify what resonates with your audience, from homepage layouts to your business description and call-to-action buttons. Experiment with different approaches, and let data guide your decisions. When you continuously refine your strategies, you’ll uncover what truly drives satisfaction—and repeat business.

Measuring customer experience is just as important as creating it. Don’t rely on guesswork. Tools like customer feedback surveys, Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) help you gauge how well you’re meeting customer expectations. Dive into your data to identify friction points in the journey, then take action to remove them.

Pro tip: For a deep dive into how to track and improve your CX strategy, explore our blog on measuring customer experience like a pro. It’s packed with insights to help you connect data with action.

Supercharge your strategies with AI

AI is essential for scaling holiday marketing and delivering seamless, engaging experiences across locations. By using AI thoughtfully, you can tackle key challenges like managing local business data, enhancing customer interactions, and optimizing visual and written content for maximum impact—and the right tools can help you execute effectively.

First, ensure local search visibility. Inconsistent or outdated location data is one of the fastest ways to lose a potential customer. During the busy holiday season, shoppers rely on search engines to find accurate information about store hours, locations, and services. If your information is incorrect or incomplete, you risk losing business to a competitor.

Our software uses AI to ensure your location data is accurate, consistent, and optimized across platforms like Google Business Profile and Apple Maps. This guarantees customers can find you when it matters most.

Next, stay ahead with reputation management. Shoppers trust customer reviews—and during the holiday rush, they’re scanning them quickly to decide where to shop or dine. Customer engagement is key here, and responding promptly to reviews, whether positive or negative, shows your customers that you’re listening and care about their experience. But for multi-location businesses, managing reviews across hundreds of locations can feel like an impossible task.

AI-powered sentiment analysis makes it manageable. It scans reviews in real time, identifying key themes and flagging positive or negative sentiments. Our tools help you prioritize which reviews need immediate attention, allowing you to build trust and loyalty across every location.

You can make visuals work harder for your brand, too. Images and videos are the unsung heroes of holiday marketing. Whether it’s a product photo, a festive promotion, or a local event, high-quality visuals catch attention and drive engagement. But are your visuals optimized for search? If they’re not, you could be missing out on valuable traffic.

That’s where AI-powered visual recognition comes in. It analyzes the content within your visuals to ensure they’re optimized for local SEO, helping them rank higher and attract more customers. Our software takes the guesswork out of this process, so you can maximize the impact of every image and video.

Finally, no local marketing strategy is complete without streamlined personalized content creation. Creating personalized, localized messaging for every location is critical for connecting with your audience, but it’s also time-consuming. 

AI can help by generating content ideas, drafting promotional messages, and even creating multiple ad variations tailored to specific regions or audiences. This means you can deliver relevant, engaging content across dozens (or hundreds) of locations without overloading your team.

And remember, AI is at its best when paired with human creativity. Use it to handle repetitive, data-driven tasks, but rely on your team to bring the strategic insight and empathy that make your brand stand out. For more on how our AI-powered tools can help you optimize your holiday marketing strategies, visit Rio SEO.

Key takeaways

If you want an effective holiday marketing campaign, it’s all about strengthening the local experience. The brands that stand out during the holidays (and all year long) focus on what matters most: delivering experiences customers remember at every stage of the customer journey. That means showing up with seamless, personalized journeys in every interaction to build trust and loyalty.

Get the basics right first. Keep your local search presence accurate, your messaging clear, and your community engagement genuine. Then, go further. Use personalization to meet customers where they are and AI to scale your efforts while keeping every touchpoint thoughtful and human.

Customer experience means making every shopper feel valued, understood, and supported. When you show up for your customers, they’ll show up for you—not just this season, but year-round.

With the right strategies and tools, you can turn the holidays into more than just a peak sales period. You’ll create meaningful connections, deepen loyalty, and build a foundation for long-term growth. It’s your time to shine. With the right tools and strategies, you can own the holiday season.

Get started today by learning more about Rio SEO’s comprehensive suite of enterprise-tailored local experience solutions.