It's not too early to prep for the holiday season: Your marketing guide to success
The Holiday Season is rapidly approaching! Can you believe, 2017 is almost over? This time of year, is the perfect opportunity for businesses to launch new products, to introduce your brand to new customers, build your online community, and meet new sales goals! Holiday sales are expected to increase at record numbers. In fact, Deloitte expects retail holiday sales to top $1 trillion between the months of November and January this year. E-commerce sales, meanwhile, are expected to increase 18 to 21 percent during the 2017 holiday season.
For those of you who have retail brands, or online stores, personal chefs, and fitness coaches, there are a number of ways you can capitalize on the upcoming holiday season. Throughout the season, I’ll be providing tips on how to create marketing campaigns with strategic planning and implementation.
Grab a Copy of your Holiday Play book for tips, on growing your brand this holiday season!
Goals
As you plan for the upcoming holiday season, think about your overall goals while including actionable steps to achieve them. For example, perhaps you’ve recently launched your online clothing store and this is your first holiday season. Naturally you want to be able to sell as many products as possible. To help you better understand your goals, here’s a few questions to ask yourself
How will you market your business to attract customers?
Who is your target audience, particularly those who are shopping during the holiday season?
Who are the customers purchasing items for as gifts?
How much inventory do you need to prepare for the “holiday rush”?
Do you plan on extending your customer service hours to handle customer related issues?
I mean, let’s face it, the end goal here is about profitability no doubt, however, it’s very important that you’re strategic about your goals. If the goal is to sale X amount of products during the holiday season, then you have to have a fulfillment process in place to be able to handle the volume.
Plan
Once you have a clear understanding of what your overall goal is, now it’s time to create the necessary steps to achieve them. Don’t by pass this step! Why? Because every move you make in business must be strategic. First, download the “2017 Holiday Calendar” to have an idea of what the upcoming holidays are, including the dates. This will help you with your planning which will give you an idea of your respective target dates. It will even help you create “themes” for your marketing campaigns based on the holiday of choice.
Create Content
Next, let’s talk about how you’ll “reel” your customers in. Unfortunately, my friends, you can’t just post a “holiday related” themed picture on your website and hope that customers will purchase your products. There are 100,000,000 brands that will have “holiday themed” websites. What will make your product and or offering differ than your competitors?
Here’s a tip, create content that focuses on obtaining new customers or retaining existing customers. You may have to create separate campaigns to target each customer. An example of marketing to a new customer would be to offer a discount on products in exchange for an email address. The object here, is to add them to a mailing list to market future products. Another example of marketing to your target audience, such as existing customers, customer appreciation “gift”. Add a gift to their purchase for being a “loyal” customer.
Calendaring
Wearing multiple hats, including the “marketing” director role, is one of the many positions we have to juggle as entrepreneurs. To help you stay on top of your marketing campaigns, schedule when you’ll launch each campaign and for how long. A week? Two days? The weekend? This will help you to stay organized which is essential for running a business. Always include the days you’ll spend creating content. For example, designate Sundays to create content for the week.
Social media management tools
Social media is a by far, one of the most effective platforms to use to grow your business. Many of you will be using social media as a tool to market your business during the holiday season. Having a social media management tool is essential to helping you stay on top of your social media platforms. Most social media management tools are compatible with your Android and IOS systems. Here’s a list of tools to choose from
Tweepi
Analytics
Always measure your results by checking your analytics on every marketing campaign you launch. You want to be able to see and or understand, which platforms, channels and campaigns are working. It is critical that you’re aware of how effective your marketing efforts are, especially if you’re paying for promotional and advertisements. If a certain method isn’t working, you can ditch the idea all together or “tweak” it accordingly.
The holiday season is almost upon us and having a strategic plan in place to capitalize on one of the busiest times of the year will help you move your products, meet sales goals and find new customers.
