Holiday Planning Checklist For Your Product Description Pages (PDPs)

Holidays are a big deal in the eCommerce industry 🎁.

It’s also no lie the holiday season brings in a state of mad rush, and content teams are often overworked (and managing strict deadlines) during this time.

Even in this state of panic, we’re all aware of one thing: Whatever happens, our audience has to only see picture-perfect campaigns and product content.

We get just how stressful it can be, which is why we’re here with a checklist of items that’ll improve your efficiency levels and help you stay on top of your holiday product content tasks!

Let’s explore the action items on the list, shall we?

Action #1: Mark your calendar!

Starting off strong with the first action item, let’s first mark our calendars with the most popular U.S. (or your region-specific) holidays.

To get you started, here’s a list of some of the beloved holidays and celebrations in the United States (and their respective dates):

• New Year’s Day: January 1
• Martin Luther King Jr. Day: January 15
• Valentine’s Day: February 14
• Presidents’ Day: February 19
• St. Patrick’s Day: March 17
• Easter Sunday: March 31
• Memorial Day: May 27
• Independence Day: July 4
• Labor Day: September 2
• Halloween: October 31
• Veterans Day: November 11
• Thanksgiving Day: November 28
• Black Friday: November 29
• Cyber Monday: December 2
• Christmas Day: December 25

And you probably already know this but, here’s a ranking of the holidays by popularity, starting with Thanksgiving (which, let’s be honest, is really all about Black Friday) and going through Christmas. But hey, don’t forget—the holiday season stretches way past just Christmas!

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Keep in mind that you typically need to start planning 3-6 months in advance of each of these dates depending on the size of your eCommerce operation and product backlogs.

P.S. Struggling with a massive product backlog before the holidays? Describely has you covered.

Action #2: Enrich all of your product data to have accurate attributes

Just a quick reference: When we speak of enriching product data with accurate attributes, we mean providing your writers (or your AI) with correct product information or bullet points.

Since many of your products can be sold during different holidays, you’ll need to enrich your products with accurate product attributes, especially geared toward the specific holiday you’re selling them to (e.g., for Christmas, you might want to mention who your products could be gifted to—sister, father, wife, etc.).

We know enriching product attributes will help you improve the quality of the product descriptions you create; but on the other end of it, if you don’t enrich your product attributes (or unknowingly use inaccurate attributes), it can create a false understanding of the product, lead to misleading descriptions, and increase chances of returns/cause less sales.

To make this process easier, you can rely on technologies like Describely to do the task of data enrichment for you. With Describely’s Data Enrichment feature, you can ask it to scour the internet (and your manufacturer’s site) to find the correct product attributes based on the keywords or SKUs you provide.

Not only will this feature find you accurate information, but it’ll also cut your research time by a whole lot by allowing you to automate the research of product attributes in bulk (which might be especially helpful during holidays when everything is in a mad rush).

Action #3: Save time using AI to bulk-generate product descriptions

Let’s be real for a moment here: You know, and we know that it’s extremely time-consuming (and not to mention overwhelming and non-cost-efficient) to update or generate descriptions manually around every holiday season.

Before you make any promises to go through the manual route with your product descriptions, we’d encourage you to list down the time and cost resources you’d have to consider for every holiday campaign.

Even if you don’t outsource the task of manually writing/updating product descriptions and just stick your in-house teams with the responsibility of going through with it, just consider: Do you want to stress out your already overstressed (and possibly overworked) content teams?

As a practical business decision, it makes more sense to rely on AI to bulk generate and update your product descriptions, especially near the holiday season, with the correct attributes, and then have a human eye come in and review all the details to ensure it’s publish-ready.

In the long run, AI that’s specially created for eCommerce teams (like Describely) will help you:

• Stay consistent with your brand guidelines and tones
• Be more accurate with product information
• Reduce the risk of typos and misspellings
• Save time and costs that come with manually creating and updating descriptions
• Remove stress loads from content teams by allowing them to route bulk tasks to AI

Not to mention, it’ll scale with your business, localize content based on regional requirements, provide you with insights/analytics, and allow you to capitalize on faster time-to-market opportunities (e.g., microtrends).

Action #4: Stay on-theme with your brand guidelines

Even if your holiday campaigns were produced in a rush and things got finalized at the very last moment, there’s no need for your customers to know that. Your customers have to see picture-perfect and publish-ready descriptions in your PDPs at the end of the day.

A good way to ensure you remain on theme with your holidays and on-brand with your style guide is to incorporate these guidelines into the AI software you use.

For example, on Describely, you’ll find a dedicated Brand and Content Hub, where you can write down specifications for content rules, brand tones, and restricted keyword usage.

Here’s all that you can do with this feature:

• Create rulesets for different occasions and holidays specifying how you’d like to structure the descriptions, titles, meta content, etc. For example, here’s what a Christmas Ruleset can look like.

• You can also create references for your brand tone and include examples and anecdotes about what your unique brand tone looks like.
• You can even list down a number of restricted keywords that you’d rather avoid from your descriptions (e.g., you might not want any competitor references or hints to illegal activities). Describely has an in-built Amazon restricted keyword list, but you can add your own keywords, too.

Using this feature has another benefit where it can help you avoid any rewrites and allow you to sound more human, even while using AI throughout the whole process.

Action #5: Ensure your meta descriptions are engaging and SEO optimized

To ensure your descriptions get picked up by search engines and are easily findable, you’ll need to invest in SEO. Moreover, if you need to sell your product, you’d also need to deliver a value-packed meta description — which only adds more work to your plate!

While Describely is technically not an SEO tool, it can help you with some SEO tasks. For example, you can:

• Conduct SEO research (it’ll come back with a list of neatly categorized keywords based on a keyword or phrase you give it).
• Ask Describely to integrate the keywords you like in the product descriptions (these can either be the keywords Describely gives you or your own keywords).
• Create meta tags and descriptions. You can also set instructions on how you’d like to structure your meta descriptions and product content.
• You can even connect to Google Search Console to optimize your product page content’s SEO.

Find out more about how Describely can help you create SEO-friendly product content that satisfies Google’s E-A-T.

Action #6: Audit and review your product content to ensure it’s publish-ready

The last action item on this checklist is to review your product content to ensure it’s ready for your customers to see.

We realize you’ll be in the midst of the holiday rush when you’re reviewing your content, so you can reduce the time spent on editing by using an AI solution to do fast edits and content audits for you.

For example, you can use Describely’s Audit feature to bulk review and analyze your:

• Product claims: This feature will help you fact-check all your information. For example, if you’ve mentioned details about warranty or shipment, it’ll ask you to reconfirm the claims once to avoid legal troubles or misunderstandings later down the line.

 

• Grammatical errors: This feature will proofread your copy for you, and ask you to accept/reject grammatical suggestions. For example, with this feature, you can remove typos and misspellings, and improve your content format and phrases.

 

• Adherence to brand guidelines: If you’ve already given style guide instructions (i.e., with the Content Ruleset), Describely will verify if the way your content is written matches the instructions you’d set in your guidelines. Based on this, it’ll even fix any failures for you.

When all is said and done, we’d recommend having a set of human eyes glance at the final copy of your descriptions to review and ensure that everything’s looking tip-top.

Join other eCommerce giants in using Describely to power through peak season with ease

When you’re in the middle of the holiday deadlines, you might just need a content partner who can take at-least half the workload off your back.

Describely can become that partner for you for your holiday prep.

With us, you can:

• Generate, update, and review product descriptions in bulk
• Audit your content based on different parameters
• Stick to your brand guidelines and tones
• Find SEO-relevant keywords
• Enrich your product content with accurate attributes
• Stay consistent with the way you produce content
• Save time (and cost) developing content for each holiday season

Describely has helped brands like Target, HOM Furniture, UGG, Borsheims, etc., develop content for their brand, and we can help you out, too.

Join thousands of eCommerce businesses and learn how Describely can help you create content that sells more and ranks higher. Get started now!