10 Tips for Marketing Your Business During the Holidays. Or sponsoring or getting involved in community events is a great way to generate awareness for your business during the holidays.
Want your business to get a bigger piece of the pie during the holidays? Then start planning your holiday marketing strategy – right now. 5.10 Email Marketing Tips to Boost Holiday Sales; 6. Make your business stand out from mundane, everyday advertisements by including fun and unique Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, or other holiday themes into your current advertising. By doing this, you will immediately be associated with exciting, memorable, and seasonally-relevant content that is specifically designed to draw attention to.
Is your local business ready to tackle the holiday season and make the most of Small Business Saturday by providing a great experience for your customers? Borrow these local advertising tips and make the most of the merry season while growing your business!
The holiday season will be here before you know it, making now the ideal time to start preparing for what’s to come. Small Business Saturday kicks off the holiday season and also provides a great opportunity for local businesses to increase sales and engage with their community.
In preparation for the season we’ve pulled together a short list of high-impact tips to set your local business up for success and growth:
1. Provide Stellar Customer Service
It’s no surprise that local business owners should expect more foot traffic going into the holiday season. Make sure your employees are equipped to provide customers with a great in-store experience. One way to ensure readiness for the holiday hustle and bustle is running through possible scenarios that could occur in advance with your staff.
Be open and proactive to help guide them to act accordingly when a difficult situation presents itself. In addition to great customer service, also consider ways that you can accommodate more customers and increase sales.
Entrepreneur suggests extending hours during the holidays and even planning hours around local events in your community. For example, if there’s a holiday parade happening on a Friday until 9pm, let customers know you will be open for the duration of the parade on your social media, email newsletter, and website.
2. Spread the Word on Social Media
Social media is the best way to increase word-of-mouth awareness and provides a great avenue to stay connected to your customers and keep your business top of mind during holiday shopping. Think of ways to connect with customers during the stressful holiday season- such as offering “holiday tips and tricks” modeled around your product or service.
Forbes also suggests sharing live, “behind the scenes” videos to increase customer trust and create authentic connections. Lastly, who doesn’t love a discount? Use your social media to run a special offer or promotion for the holidays to entice the customer to visit your business over your competitors. If you need help with social media marketing, check out our recent blog for more great ideas.
3. Get Creative on Small Business Saturday! (Nov 24)
Small Business Saturday is a shopping holiday established by American Express that highlights and promotes small businesses around the United States. Small Business Saturday is celebrated the Saturday after Thanksgiving (this year on November 24), on arguably the busiest shopping weekend of the year.
The holiday encourages consumers to shop in their local communities and offers local business free marketing materials and strategies to help them better connect with their local community. If you want to participate you can hang signs in your store to let shoppers know that you are participating and consider partnering with a complementary local business in the neighborhood.
Work together to offer a special promotion if shoppers visit both locations and share products in each other’s stores. If you’re on social media, don’t forget to use hashtags such as #shopsmall or create your own branded hashtag for customers to use. To learn more about Small Business Saturday marketing ideas click here!
4. Reach Your Perfect Customers First
Instead of sitting back and waiting for customers to step into your store, be proactive and reach your perfect match customers first. Welcomemat can utilize our big data models to target the most ideal customers in your neighborhood with direct mail jumbo postcards.
We’ll work with you to profile your best customers, customize your design, and craft the right message to encourage customers to visit your business first during the holiday season. If you’d like to learn more about how Welcomemat can reach your perfect customer, check out our website!
Welcomemat Services offers a wide range of great local marketing ideas including direct mail marketing and new mover marketing! If you are interested in seeing how Welcomemat can help you grow your business during the holiday season and year round learn more here!
4 Digital Marketing Tips to Get Your Business Ready for the Holidays
Fall is here—and we all know what THAT means! Christmas decorations are already out at stores even before Halloween has happened. And while you may roll your eyes at early marketing for an event 3 months away, it’s actually a good thing to start thinking about Christmas now. If you are a product or service business, you should be preparing for the holidays as early as September-October when it comes to your online marketing strategy.
So why is this? Mountain Air Marketing will walk you through the reasons.
1.Mindful Repetition with Digital Ads
It takes a while for someone to be interested in your ad. On average, the overall opinion in marketing is that it takes about 3-7 times for someone to see your product or service before they decide it’s worth checking out. It’s the rule of repetition—but not too much repetition. Some studies have theorized that there is a threshold of ad exposure where if it’s below that threshold (which is around 3-7) someone will not really notice your company, a saturation point where you have shown yourself too many times, and a nice spot in between. Marketing experts can help your business find that sweet spot, because it’s important to juggle ad fatigue with smart marketing.
This is why starting to expose customers slowly and gradually is a much better approach than throwing 50 ads out all at once during Christmas. You want to be able to hit that sweet spot of starting to build repetition (but not too much) when it comes to the digital landscape of marketing.
2.Growth Through Authentic Connection
Notice that the last concept is about balance with digital ads—which needs to be approached in a thought-out way or consumers can ignore you altogether (ad exposure too low) or get annoyed and tune you out (ad exposure too high). This is where starting to be proactive year-round with a social media strategy can be extremely helpful—especially in the few months leading up to Christmas. As this wonderful article from Forbes points out, loyal customers will spend nearly 10 times more than a new customer.If you can continue to build a relationship with your potential buyers before the holidays, then you are less likely to be ignored or to frustrate busy, exhausted customers during the holidays.
How do you do this? If you are providing fun, thoughtful, engaging social media, that can be an extremely useful marketing tool, because it doesn’t feel like marketing to your audience. So start thinking now your holiday social media strategy and about how you’d like to promote your company online during the holidays to create meaningful connections. That way when you do create Christmas promotions, you will be able to do so to an already interested audience.
3.Longterm SEO Strategy is a MUST
If you want to rely heavily on SEO for your website’s rankings, you will need to start on best SEO practices now instead of waiting until the last minute. It takes at least 3-4 months for SEO to see movement in your rankings, because algorithms like to see a bit of history when it comes to your brand, products, and expertise. So if you are relying heavily on search engines to make your site visible to buyers, you need to start talking about your products, services, and holiday promotions a few months in advance–as well as making sure search engine ads are in place a few months in advance, too.
This usually requires some good knowledge on SEO and how to best utilize SEO practices to help rank your site and products to stand out from the billions and billions of pages of content that the web holds. No easy task, but it’s extremely vital!
4.Easy Website Navigation and Purchasing for Mobile
We can’t stress this enough! Make sure your website is responsive and easy to navigate through for those surfing on their phone. As more and more people use their mobile devices to browse the internet, if your site is outdated and clunky, it will deter visitors from buying your products or services. If they have to take the time to sit down at a desktop or laptop, chances are they may forget all about it and move on to something that is easier to get while they stand in a grocery store line or browse their phones waiting to pick up kids from school or during a meeting (we’ve all been there!).
Because more than half of internet users are doing so from a mobile phone, it’s crucial that you set your business up for success. Your responsive, mobile-friendly website will do wonders during the holiday rush.
4 Tips For Marketing Your Business During The Holidays 2017
If you don’t have time to figure this all out, call in the digital marketing professionals! Mountain Air Marketing is here to help you with your holiday digital marketing. Call us today with any and all questions and concerns!