The holidays are a great time to promote your business and make extra money. However, knowing where to start with your holiday marketing strategy can be difficult if you’re a small business owner. It’s essential not only to focus on holiday sales but also on building relationships with customers throughout the rest of the year. Here are a few tips for small businesses designing effective holiday marketing campaigns to stand out from the competition and increase sales.
Start by Analyzing Your Business Data
The first step to creating a holiday marketing strategy is analyzing your business’s data. This will help you determine which marketing channels have been the most successful and which offers are most popular with your customers. You can use a tool like Adroll to build your campaign dashboard to manage and track your holiday campaigns’ performance across platforms. With Adroll, you can instantly gather data about the performance of your campaigns and apply these insights to build a new and effective holiday marketing strategy. Learn which messages and channels generate the most engagement and conversions, and target these channels with your next campaign.
After you’ve analyzed your data, it’s time to get creative. Think about how each platform can be personalized based on your customers’ needs. Once you’ve collected all this data, creating a personalized holiday marketing strategy for each type of customer and every platform you market to throughout the year should be reasonably simple.
Know Your Audience
Knowing your audience is the first step in designing an effective holiday marketing strategy. You need to know what they want, how they like to be communicated with, and if they are likely to buy your product or service. Understanding their demographics and interests will help you reach a diverse audience by testing new marketing channels like TikTok or promotional ads. The more information you have about your customer’s buying habits, the better chance of connecting with them on social media platforms like Facebook that allow for more customization of messaging based on user preferences—and in turn, increasing conversion rates which ultimately leads to increased revenue.
Creating customer profiles enables businesses like yours to personalize messages across multiple social media platforms and email newsletters – creating sales opportunities no matter where people are located within your sales funnel or customer journey. This will also make customers feel appreciated when they receive special offers explicitly tailored toward their needs/wants. Your online audience also wants regular engagement through social media, so be sure to communicate and share their content as well as a way of promoting your own company.
Offer Buy Now, Pay Later, and Other Payment Options
Flexible payment options are essential for remaining competitive and landing higher conversions. If your site is experiencing a high abandoned cart rate, consider offering more flexible payment options to get customers through your sales funnel. Buy now, pay later options are becoming highly popular for customers who wish to make layaway purchases and establish a payment plan for their orders. Flexibility at checkout is essential for landing more sales.
Free shipping is another great way to set yourself apart from competitors, and it’s a huge draw for consumers who are on the fence about buying from you. Especially during the holiday season, offering free shipping and flexible delivery options could be critical to increasing conversions and reaching new customers.
Create a Content and Holiday Calendar
Planning your marketing schedule and holiday calendar at the beginning of each year is essential. Start by creating a calendar of all the major holidays relevant to your business, marketing goals, and audience. Consider smaller “small business” events like Small Business Saturday and more major national holidays such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Once you’ve got your holiday schedule, create an editorial calendar that includes each piece of content to be published across channels to support these campaigns. This should consist of text, images, videos, and links back to other blog posts or landing pages so readers can learn more about your products/services. Ensure that each post includes links back into your website sales funnel where it’s possible for visitors who engage with this content to convert into sales. Planning a content schedule and holiday calendar is key to ensuring your team has ample time to create the content and design the campaigns.
The holidays are a great time to take advantage of many marketing opportunities. You can run holiday-themed ads, create limited-edition products, and even do something creative like sponsoring a local community event or charity.
The truth is, there are so many great opportunities for holiday marketing and various options for reaching customers directly, so you don’t have to spend a fortune on marketing. You can still create a strong campaign that will benefit your business if you start early and use the right tools—social media being one of them! With some planning, creativity, and hard work, you’ll be able to make the most of the holidays in 2023 and reach more customers than ever before.
Article by Born Realist