For small business owners, the holiday season can be frustrating. It can be hectic. It can be exhausting. It can be a complete bust.
It can also be wildly lucrative. Your best season out of the entire year.
The key, as always, lies in marketing; in leveraging holiday trends to make the biggest splash you can; to use festive incentives to bring more customers to your store or to your website.
Holiday marketing is something we have already addressed at the Grammar Chic blog, of course—both in terms of your small business website and in terms of your e-mail marketing initiative.
Today, we want to highlight a few seasonal trends that could make a world of difference for your company and its marketing, if you seize them and use them to your advantage.
Seasonal Shopping Spree
We’ll start with an obvious point: During the month of December, an awful lot of people are going to be shopping. They’re going to be shopping more than usual. They’re going to be shopping around the clock.
That’s clearly a good thing for your small business—but only if you can actually tap into that uptick in shopping.
More than ever before, you’ve got to make it enticing for people who are shopping—people who are in a buying state of mind—to visit your store or your website. Launch a promotion, and publicize it on social media and on your blog. BOGOs, holiday discounts, free shipping—whatever you can offer to lure in shoppers.
Getting Mobile
More shoppers means more people on the go—and that means more people accessing your company website and social media via their smartphones rather than their laptops and desktops.
Does your small business website function well on mobile devices? And are your holiday promotions clearly displayed, without customers needing to do too much iPhone scrolling?
If you’re not making a concentrated effort to capture the attention of mobile shoppers—to make the shopping experience as easy as possible for them—then you’re going to end up with a lot of frustrated holiday consumers who navigate away from your website almost immediately. You could lose those leads forever.
Social Shopping
Statistics report that holiday shoppers get insights and recommendations from social media more than they do the people they’re shopping with.
In other words: The average lady, out shopping for gifts, will trust Twitter recommendations over the advice of her own girlfriends.
If ever there was a time to be serious about content marketing and social sharing, this is it. Offer product pictures, reviews, recommendations, shopping guides—anything you can to educate and inform your potential customers and clients.