This holiday season provides the perfect time to ramp up your marketing. After all, the season brings in more sales than the rest of the year. Competition is fierce in practically every niche, however, so you have to take advantage of every holiday and not assume that customers will just come in.

But how do you engage customers during every holiday season throughout the year?

Here are some tried and tested tips that will make your holiday content marketing a success.

1. Create content that your customers will find useful and interesting

You've heard that said so many times, and there is a reason for that: The cornerstone of your marketing campaign is content that your customers will want to read.

What are some examples of content you should write?

• Articles that answers common questions your customers may have during this season
  
• Articles that provide solutions to your customers' problems
• Articles that showcase promos related to the holiday season
  

Content should be related to your niche and targeted to your audience. Also, craft your articles so that they are amusing or interesting, and worth your customers' time. Otherwise, your content marketing will probably be useless.

(Editor's note: Check out Everybody Writes for how-to advice on writing and creating content your customers will love.)

2. Make your content share-worthy

Some ways to inspire sharing from your audience is to...

• Design your articles or emails so that they are aesthetically pleasing and relate to the holiday theme
  
• Use holiday-related images and/or short videos, especially for promos and deals
• Highlight the benefits of your promo

Whether your content is a blog post or an e-newsletter, include share buttons for the most common social networks. For example, if you're running a blog on WordPress, take a look at plugins like ShareThis.

3. Encourage action from your customers

More than focusing only on share-worthy content and making it easy for readers to share, make sure you're converting shares into something concrete for you. Include a compelling call-to-action in your content. Make it visible so that readers can't miss it, but don't oversell.

There are various ways to do this. One example would be to ask readers to share a post on Facebook to get a coupon that gives them a discount code. Make the discount so that it can't be ignored, but still not affect your business negatively. The same thing can apply for a tweet or follow.

4. Run a holiday giveaway

You can do this on your blog or other blogs in your network. That will get the attention of your customers and spread the word about your business as well. I suggest using Rafflecopter to run your giveaway as it provides the social sharing options as well as random choosing of winners.

5. Prepare as early as possible

What holidays are coming up next? You might want to start making plans as early as now. Think about the content that you will be writing, the giveaways that you will be running, and promotions you will be offering.

If you're personally to busy for all the preparations, assign someone in your team to lead brainstorming sessions, so you'll have something to work with later on, instead of starting from scratch.

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Marketing for the holidays is not a no-brainer, but it is not that difficult either. If you make plans, know your target audience, and be as creative as you can, then your marketing campaign will be a success.