How To Drive More Business During The Holiday Season

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The holiday season is fast upon us, which means you should already have a firm marketing strategy in place to get more holiday shoppers. Whether you run a brick-and-mortar or eCommerce store, you can expect tons of shopping the day after Thanksgiving and throughout December, only if you start driving business right now. Here’s how you can drive more business during the holiday season.

Start Preparing Early

The best part about the holiday season is that every business can create a strategy that succeeds by early planning. So whether you’re a landlord looking for tenants for a single-family rental or an eCommerce business owner, the holidays are a perfect time to start building brand awareness and converting customers.

Your marketing plan for the holidays should be prepared in July or August so you can start preparing. Waiting until December to plan your Christmas specials means most of your potential customers have already bought or already know exactly what they want to buy for their friends and family, so you’ll miss out on those valuable customers.

While coming up with your marketing and advertising strategy may only take you a few weeks, other preparations need to be made in advance so you can ensure you have enough products to sell and have a correct budget. Here’s what you should start preparing in July before every holiday season.

Inventory:

During the holidays, consider stocking up on popular items. If you do your marketing and advertising correctly, you’re going to have more people coming to your store during the holiday season than the rest of the year, so you need to make sure you won’t run out of anything.

Marketing Strategy:

If you’re going to be marketing specific products this holiday season, you’ll need to make sure you’ll have them in stock, but you’ll also need an effective marketing strategy to get the word out about any new or seasonal products. If you’re going to have any holiday deals, then your marketing strategy can bring more people to your store.

Promotional and Advertising Materials:

Whether you’re using digital marketing, traditional marketing, or both, you’ll need to make sure you give your designers and marketers enough time to get the promotional materials completed by the time you want to start advertising.

Deals:

The holiday time is perfect for you to start giving more deals because you can draw in more customers. You should never wait until the last minute to figure out what your holiday offers will be because you’ll need to do the right math and ensure you can still profit from those sales.

As part of the preparations, take a look at your past holiday marketing efforts and see how they performed. For example, you can check out your influencer marketing analytics to determine which influencers successfully drove sales to your business.

Taking a look at last year’s marketing materials, strategies, and sales can help you determine what you can invest more money in and where you can cut costs.

Find the Right Marketing Strategies

Choosing the right marketing strategy and channels to promote your business and its products during the holiday season is key to helping you maximize your budget. Unfortunately, too many small business owners make the mistake of not choosing the right marketing channels, which ends up costing them too much money.

There are many ways to figure out which marketing channels are right for you, but nothing works better than a little trial and error. Plan to spend a little bit of your budget learning which acquisition channels are right for you if you don’t already know. Make sure to test:

Social media ads
Google ads
Email marketing
Traditional marketing

If you’ve done any type of marketing before, it’s time to review the results of those campaigns. Look at your:

Cost per acquisition
Total cost
Conversion rate
Sales

Learning from your past will tell you which channels work best for your business, but it can also give you insight into your customers. If you’ve been tracking the results of marketing campaigns, you can find out better ways to market to your customers without breaking the bank.

Create Seasonal Landing Pages

If you’re going to be investing in digital marketing, then you should consider creating seasonal landing pages. When you’re using Google Ads or social media ads, you should have a plan to easily implement those visitors into customers. Remember, your ads are predominately about getting conversions, so you need a unique landing page that can help you get more sales.

End Later

The holiday shopping season doesn’t have to end when Christmas is over. Instead, consider extending your offers to get more sales. During the holidays, you can expect more gift returns than during any other season, so you need to find a way to keep people shopping at your store.

Similarly, more people are going to be buying gift cards, which means people are going to be eager to use their gift cards. By extending your offers past the holidays, you can get more shoppers in your store. Remember, people may come to your business because they have a gift card, but many often purchase more than the amount on the gift card, allowing you to get more sales after the holidays.

Set Your Business Up for Increase in Demand

If you’re going to be promoting anything during the holidays, then you need to be able to handle increases in shoppers, customers, and people who want to talk to you. Getting your business ready for an increase in demand goes far beyond ensuring you have enough inventory, although you should double-check that as well.

You should also ensure your staff is prepared and ready to deal with more customers, orders, and shipping demands. Lastly, your website should be ready to handle a higher volume of traffic. As you know, high volumes can lead to slower speeds, which can impact sales.

The holiday season gives your business a chance to make more money so you don’t have to spend all year trying to catch up. Make sure you’re prepared on all fronts to handle an influx of customers and website traffic, then choose the best marketing strategy based on your customers and your business.

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Matt Casadona has a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, with a concentration in Marketing and a minor in Psychology. Matt is passionate about marketing and business strategy and enjoys San Diego life, traveling, and music.