5 holiday marketing strategies for small businesses

It’s Mariah Carey season. folks!

It’s that time of the year when she emerges from the ocean to serenade us with holiday music and kick off the Christmas shopping season.

I want to give you some marketing strategies that will allow you to maximise your revenue for the holiday period. Let’s see if we can help our businesses close out the year with a bang.

Here are the five things I want your business to implement:

1. Incentivise e-commerce

2. Focus on stories and benefits

3. Curate gift ideas

4. Post-season events

5. Collaborate with other brands

Incentivise e-commerce

Having a website with your catalogue, or using pay links/payment buttons from Social Pay, Fygaro or the banks with social media, can help your shopping experience tremendously. Patrons are going to want to get away from traffic on the roads, and malls and giving them the option to shop online and have items delivered is going to be huge. This will also allow people to shop with your business at any time of the day.

This is also a great opportunity for you to offer discount codes to push people to buy through your digital channels. That way you ensure your sales are coming in steadily throughout the Christmas season.

Focus on stories and benefits

When creating social media posts, I want you to fight every urge to take a video of a product with the price or a video of your sales rep rattling off the specifications of an item and the price.

Focus on telling stories and selling the benefits of how these products or services will alleviate key pain points for your audience.

Example. One of the top questions asked over 1,800 times in TT about mattresses in the last 30 days is: “What are the best mattresses for sciatica?”

Another top question is: “What are the best mattresses for side sleepers?”

Taking this information, you could create content with a physician who is breaking down the benefits of different types of beds for those with sciatica and what are the best sleep positions or pillows for them.

Don’t just tell us this bed has memory foam and that it’s “rell good” in your social media post. Tell a story, sell the benefits and show us how it solves pain points in our lives.

Curate gift ideas

One of the top questions people ask themselves every year is: what do you get someone who has everything? With so much happening in our lives right now, we don’t want to overthink what gifts to buy people.

Now is a great time for businesses to start curating gift ideas or packages. Think about the different types of people in our lives and create gift packages with each of those people in mind.

Post-holiday events

A great incentive to buy particular products would be post-holiday events. Just imagine I purchase a new Whirlpool stove and that particular item came with a free pass to a group cooking session with an esteemed chef. Think about incentivising purchases not just with discount prices, but creating an event out of particular items.

Imagine selling a children's Lego set and they get access to either an in-person or virtual Lego-building session.

The possibilities are endless, and they allow you to build a relationship with the client beyond the initial purchase.

Collaborate with other brands

This season will be a great time to look at other companies that have synergy with your products or services and create either offers or experiences that will allow you to tap into each other's customer bases.

Imagine a grocery partnering with a restaurant. The two create a Christmas dinner event where they have different menus and the chef from the restaurant is teaching the group how to make the menu. The goods to prepare the dishes on the menu are bought by the grocery partner.

People are looking for value and experiences. The companies that can figure out who they can align themselves with to give value and curate experiences for their clients are going to win big.

The last thing I will say is: businesses should establish relationships with good courier companies and heavily promote that people can buy your products online and have the items delivered. You don’t need to do deliveries for yourselves; clients will happily pay for delivery because of the time it is going to save them.

If you can put these strategies into play for the holiday season, you are going to stand out from those who are still using age-old marketing and sales tactics in hopes that they have a big holiday season.

I’m looking forward to seeing who gets creative over the next few weeks.

Keron Rose is a digital strategist who works with Caribbean entrepreneurs to build their digital presence and monetise their platforms. Check out Keronrose.com to learn more or the Digipreneur FM podcast available on Apple Podcast/Spotify/Google Podcast.