The holidays are an important time of year for a business of any size. For small local businesses in particular, it is especially important that you know how to best prepare yourself for the holidays. Most of all, that will mean focusing strongly on your holiday marketing campaigns, to ensure that sales remain high and the business keeps its strength throughout the year. In order to make sure your holiday marketing campaigns are truly successful, there are plenty of things you’ll need to keep at the forefront. In particular, you’ll have to manage your online reputation as closely as you can. Let’s take a look at what you might need to focus on to make sure of that.
Plan Well In Advance
Probably the biggest mistake you could make would be to fail to prepare your marketing for the holidays. You know the old saying: fail to prepare, prepare to fail. Well, it really is true, and if you want to ensure that your business is set up well for the holidays then you are going to need to plan ahead as far as possible, both with regard to the campaign itself and with regard to keeping your online reputation as strong as it can be. Get on it, and optimize your strategy now while you have the chance.
Create Anticipation
In a sense, all marketing makes use of a sense of anticipation in some way or another. But when it comes to marketing your business’ products and services for the holidays, you will probably find that this becomes especially important. As such, you should look into what you have to do in order to create the most anticipation possible. It could mean that you have to start early in trying to generate a feeling, but as long as you are leading towards something exciting you’ll find this happens almost by itself anyway.
Go Thematic
Themes have a way of really helping things along, and it’s easy to see why. Some themes, moreover, lend themselves particularly well to the holiday marketing ideas you might have, so you could go for those. But an important part of keeping your reputation in line with your goals is ensuring that you don’t go for the obvious or cliche themes that might automatically suggest themselves. If you instead aim for themes that might be a little surprising, then the reaction from consumers will be likely stronger, and your reputation as a small business will be more secure too.
Align Your Streams
Chances are, you are already thinking about a number of different streams that you tend to use when you are marketing. You will certainly need to make use of these during your holiday marketing campaigns, but in particular ou will have to make sure that you are aligning those streams as fully as you can. The more you align your email and your social marketing streams, the more of an all-round successful marketing campaign you are likely to have. This is in effect a way of curating the customer experience in such a way that everything you do is that much more powerful, so it is hugely important to look into.
Shareability Above All Else
Speaking of social media marketing, you need to put a particular amount of focus on this part of your process if you want to see some real success. Something you need to make sure of above all is that your media is shareable, so that customers are much more likely to share it around. In essence, you can then sit back over the holidays and allow your marketing to unfold on its own, and that is exactly the kind of easy process you should be trying to encourage.
Creativity Is Key
If you only ever go with the old ways of trying to bring customers on board in the holidays, then they are going to notice, and it is highly likely that you won’t see the same kind of results that you are really hoping for. If, instead, you make a point of being as creative as possible, you might find that this is much more helpful, and in general it will mean that the holiday marketing campaign is going to be much more successful. It will also help to keep your reputation where you want it to be, rather than merely allowing it to flounder over the holiday period.
As you can see, there is a lot to think about when you are planning your holiday marketing campaigns. But as long as you consider these things, you should do much better.
