3 Proven Small Business Marketing Strategies To Boost Sales During The Holidays

Every small business owner dreams of making a splash in the river to become an industry giant like Amazon. The holiday season is one of the best opportunities to make this splash. There’s Valentine’s Day, Christmas, Halloween, and so many other holidays that can give you the boost in sales that your business is looking for. 

As a small business owner, harnessing these special times of the year to focus on getting your sales numbers right up there is essential. At the same time, it is also very challenging for small businesses to participate and engage in seasonal holidays because of their limited resources. Fortunately, there are strategies to minimize challenges and make the most of these seasonal opportunities.

Read on ahead to learn about successful business owners’ effective marketing strategies for their small business marketing.

1. Make the most out of holiday themes

An effective strategy for seasonal advertising is to embrace the holiday festive spirit by adding holiday themes to your website and social media. This makes it clear to people that you are running a holiday campaign and getting the traction you want. 

Here are some popular ways of adding the holiday theme to your business:

Embrace the holiday theme on social media:

Add a themed page cover or banner to your Facebook and Twitter accounts. If you want to take this one step further, you can add seasonable colours and graphics to your social media posts, e.g. red and pink with hearts for Valentine’s Day. 

Here is an example from Starbucks, an international coffeehouse chain, on how to theme your social media during the Halloween season.

You can create themed social media posts like this and do much more in a few simple steps with the content creation tools available today. The ease of access to such affordable tools makes it easier for small businesses to create engaging visual graphics for social media and other channels. But if you’re having trouble navigating this, you can even hire professionals such as this Australian logo design team to help create graphics that are unique to your business. This will surely make a positive impression on your customers and help your business stand out.

Build custom landing pages: 

Create a separate landing page for your website targeted at your holiday offerings. You can promote seasonal discounts and packages for your campaign here and add holiday colours and graphics to make it look more appealing. You can then run ads on Google and Facebook to market this specific landing page, ensuring that you can make the most of your holiday promotions and sales.

There are countless landing page builder tools out there that you can use to design and build themed landing pages. But we recommend Unbounce for its competitive pricing and pre-built templates that you can use to create stunning landing pages. For inspiration on how a landing page should look, take this example from Lancôme, a cosmetics company, during their Valentine’s Day campaign.

2. Send themed email campaigns to keep people in the loop even if they’re not tuning in to social media

Email marketing is one of the most effective channels for increasing conversion and turning leads into customers. It is also a great way to remind loyal customers to purchase from you again during the holidays. Statistics show that 81% of small and medium-sized businesses use email as their primary acquisition channel, which shows the effectiveness of email marketing.

So, how should you do email marketing for seasonal holidays? Here is a step-by-step breakdown.

Build an email campaign:

You build an email campaign with themed emails surrounding the holiday. Alternatively, if you have a regular email newsletter, you can add holiday deals and promotions, designing and theming it according to the occasion. 

All such seasonal marketing emails do not have to be about your business. You can even compile and send out holiday-themed gift guides, such as a Christmas gift guide, giving people ideas on the best gifts they can get for their loved ones, and then include a link to one or more of your products in such guides. 

If you are looking for a quick and simple way of building and managing your email campaigns, we recommend trying out PosterMyWall. It allows you to easily manage and organise your email campaigns, mailing lists, and email designs so that you can focus on what’s most important: the content. The cherry on top is the affordable pricing and plans with many freebies (such as free downloadable graphics to share on social media).

Segment your audience:

Segmenting and personalizing your audience into the most relevant product category groups can help you drive conversion rates.

For example, when building an email for Valentine’s Day, one segment can be men, and one can be women. You will market and promote the ‘Best Gifts for Her’ to the men and vice versa when everyone is looking to buy gifts for their significant other. 

This is an important step because, without segmentation, you will be marketing the wrong products to the wrong audiences, losing precious email volume and effort.

Pay close attention to the subject line

Add an effective, converting subject line that appeals to the customers and gets them to open your emails. This is a vital step because no matter how good your email’s content is, customers need to see it before making a purchase. 

Some helpful tips for writing a good subject line are:

• Keep it short, simple, and concise.
• Use numbers (such as 50% off) to ensure customers know what you are offering immediately.
• Create a sense of urgency by adding phrases like ‘Hurry up’ or ‘Grab it before it runs out’.

Here are three examples of well-written subject lines to get your creative juices flowing:

• Ho Ho Ho FreeShipping, Here we go!

• Gifts For Him/Her Under $20!
• Zombie apocalypse: who do you save? The one with the gift card.

3. Make use of old-school flyers and newspaper ads to promote your seasonal deals 

This last strategy is for all the people in your audience who are not the tech-savvy type. Imagine a grandmother wanting to buy gifts for Christmas for her grandchildren: Will she look at your campaigns over email or social media? No. But she will look at that beautiful ad in the local newspaper or the eye-catching flyer in your stores. 

So, you can reach out to an entirely new audience for the next seasonal holiday by sending out flyers and publishing an ad in the local newspaper. 

Here is how you can use some old-school marketing strategies to boost your seasonal holiday sales:

Holiday-themed flyers:

Design a holiday-themed flyer and poster highlighting the seasonal discounts or deals you offer during the holidays. For example, if you are looking for Valentine’s marketing ideas, you can look at how L’Enfant Cafe has done it in one of its flyers. 

Once designed, you can distribute these from house to house if you operate in a small town or put them out in shopping malls and supermarkets for wider distribution. You can also keep these small business flyers in your store and/or post them on your social media to get maximum traction from the flyer you design. 

To make the process of designing and preparing a flyer easier, we recommend that you use an online graphic design tool. Such tools offer various holiday templates that you can choose from and customise according to your business requirements. For instance, if you want to design a Valentine’s Day flyer like in the example above, you can check out this Valentine Day template to create a high-quality, attractive flyer within minutes.

Advert in a local newspaper:

Publish a newspaper ad in a popular local newspaper ad and create a sense of urgency by adding phrases like ‘Offer ends in 3 days and ‘Get it before stock runs out’. It is helpful to also include a link to your online store or social media in such adverts (especially if you sell online) since people can directly visit your online store and order. 

In addition to local newspapers, you should consider the power of advertising on the local radio. By enlisting the help of a Radio Advertising Agency you can develop targeted audio ads for the people that live in your area. Through using high-quality original content, you can make your brand stand out and increase brand visibility.

Conclusion

Seasonal holidays present an excellent opportunity for small businesses to maximize their sales and expand before the next dull period starts. By following the seasonal marketing ideas that we have listed in this blog post, you can take full advantage of the next holiday rush and bring in a big win for your business.