The holidays are notoriously busy, so it’s never too early to start planning your small business holiday season strategy. As a jewelry designer, the holiday season can present a lot of distractions if you don’t plan correctly. It’s a great time to encourage your audience to have custom gifts made. It also provides several opportunities for increasing your sales to completely new customers through marketing promotions. If you are new to creating a holiday marketing strategy, here are five different small business holiday season marketing tips.
Plan Your Strategy
Planning your strategy is one of those that I rely on for a successful season. Start by researching what other brands are doing and which promotions you want to emulate for your jewelry business.
Figure out Promotion Timing and Marketing Strategies
Then, once you have all your ideas jotted down, take them to a calendar. Create a timeline for your promotions and start adding your shows and any other special events. Once you having the timing down, figure out how you want to promote your offers. Promotion strategies include email, social media, or even print strategies. The tactics you choose should resonate with your primary audience. They should also work with the supporting promotion so you maximize sales.
Find the right promotion images
Once you have everything in place, consider what imagery you’d like to use for your different promotions. Using imagery that is consistent for your website, social media account, and events can help everything together across the platforms. Using different imagery for each promotion can also visually separate your offerings for your audience, and signify something new.
Cater to the right audience
Nine religions celebrate holidays during the last two months of the year. This means there are lots of opportunities to cater to specific audiences in your audience, and as a small-business owner living where you do business, nobody knows better your market better than you.
As you create your content calendar, don’t limit yourself just to December. More importantly, don’t feel like you need to keep the secret of your sales or events for too long. Sharing upcoming offers and events to your customers early can help them plan in their busy schedule. Since many new shoppers will show in multiple places over several weeks, keeping your offerings fresh and your set up different can help you appear fresh to buyers.
Be creative with your offers
Small businesses may not be able to discount their products in the same way as the big retailers, but there are other advantages you can offer your customers. Share top-selling and hot items with your audience so they can see favorites among your offerings. You can also show inventory numbers on those same popular items so your customers know when stock is running low. Scarcity can drive interest, and nothing is worse as a consumer than finding out your perfect gift is gone!
If you have an online site, listing shipping cutoff dates is also helpful. Make a big deal of these dates and even layer promotions to support them. Chances are that a little nudge can help your customers take the plunge and purchase that gift they’ve been eyeing.
Have fun
There are so many different traditions around the holidays, it may make sense to incorporate some of them into your holiday schedule. Bake cookies for your buyers. Play holiday music at your station. Offer gift wrapping as an option. You can even offer grab bags or other promotions that are event-specific.
Successful Small Business Holiday Season Marketing Tips
Use these small business holiday season marketing tips as building blocks for your full strategy, and remember it’s never too early to begin planning. Are there any go-to seasonal marketing tips that you have? Share them below in the comments!