The holidays are a time when many brands and companies are going to be doing a majority of their yearly sales, and if you are a small brand or business, it is a very important time to be marketing yourself as much as possible. Holiday-specific marketing and branding is key to a successful holiday season no matter what your business goals are. Below are some tips to help you market your small brand or business as successful as possible this holiday season.
Use Giveaways and Contests
Giveaways and contests are a great way to do minimal work but get maximum exposure, and this is especially true during the holidays. Giveaways and contests both give your brand or business more exposure because your followers will tag or share content about your brand on their own social media accounts, which means their followers are seeing it as well.
For a giveaway, choose a few products or services to give away. For example, if you run a waxing salon, offering 4 waxes as a package would work since 6.97 million people in America got waxes at least 4 times in the first half of 2019. In order to have people enter the giveaway, tell them to tag a certain number of friends in the comments and share the post to their stories or feeds, depending on the social media platform you’re using to promote your giveaway. Also, make sure to include in your caption that only people who are following you can win the giveaway. This will result in a spike in followers and exposure to your account.
Contests will probably not get you the same amount of exposure as a giveaway will, but the content that people create will show dedication to your brand. This will clue in the followers of those who enter that your brand is worth time and effort. You can have a contest for the most festive photo involving your product or take a page out of Starbucks’ book and have a contest for the best-decorated cup or other similar product. Give the winner something enticing like you would for a giveaway. You can also use the contest entries for your own page’s content as long as you get permission, making it easier to have more holiday content to choose from and post.
Bundle & Save Coupons are always fun to use too. Your customer not only saves money but also tend to end up buying more than one product.
Partner With Charity
Partnering with a charity can be a great way to get a positive view of your brand or business during the holidays. You can offer to donate a portion of your holiday proceeds to the charity and advertise the future donation. This will make your customers feel better about their purchase because they will not only be getting the products that they want to buy from you, but they will also be donating to charity at the same time. If you are a blogger or influencer, you can offer to match or meet donations submitted by your followers as well.
If you choose to do this, try to choose a local charity — your donation will make more of an impact on a local animal shelter as opposed to a nationwide organization like the ASPCA.
Dress Up Your Social Media and Website
Making your website and social media accounts more fun for the holiday season is a great way to catch the attention of your followers. Try to choose a specific holiday aesthetic that you can use consistently across all your platforms. For example, if you decide that your marketing campaign will focus on a “winter wonderland” theme, make your brand or business’ profile pictures feature snowflakes or winter scenes. Remember that it only takes 0.05 seconds for users to form their opinion on your website, so make your changes very obvious. The more festive the better, just make sure your design is still aesthetically pleasing.
Make a Gift Guide
Gift guides are very helpful to shoppers during the holiday season. If someone is unsure what to get as a gift for someone in their life, a gift guide can be the perfect spark of inspiration and result in a sale for your business. If you only have a few products in your shop because you are a relatively new business, try partnering with bloggers and influencers to get onto the gift guides they give out to their followers.
Partner With Bloggers and Influencers
Speaking of partnering with bloggers and influencers, you can work together for more than just gift guides during the holidays. If you are a small brand or business, partnering with bloggers and influencers can be helpful to get your content out there to a wider audience. If you’re a blogger or influencer, you can also reach out to businesses that you would like to work with. By partnering together to put out content on both a business’ social media accounts and influencers’ accounts, you can have a mutually beneficial relationship.
Pop-Up
Pop-up shops are very common during the holiday season, and they can be especially beneficial when different small local businesses partner together to host a pop-up as a group. Pop-up shops have a market value of $50 billion right now, so the concept is definitely beneficial. You can work with other businesses to find or make a space for your pop-up. Building one in an unusual space, like a converted shipping container, could be another way to get free advertisement for your business. The novelty of an unusual space can make your customers post and share about the pop-up event. Partnering with other businesses will result in being exposed to more than just your usual customer base and can lead to sales you would not have otherwise made.
Utilize Your Email
Holiday emails start going out as soon as Halloween ends, but it’s never too late to start. Plan out your email campaign at the start of the season to ensure that you’re sending out consistent and matching content. Try not to send too many emails because if you begin overwhelming your customers’ inboxes, they may unsubscribe from the email list. Instead, send out fewer higher-quality emails to try to get more traffic from your emails.
The holidays can be a great time for your brand or business to get more traffic and sales. Make sure that you’re capitalizing on the different marketing techniques in this article so you can make the most out of the crazy and busy season at the end of the year.
What do you like to see from brands during the holidays? Do you have any holiday marketing tips? Drop it in the comments!
