Without a doubt majority of businesses are reaching their busiest time of year and marketing teams go into overdrive with hooks like Black Friday, Cyber Monday and don’t forget Small Business Saturday.
Small Business Saturday (SBS), however, is special – launched in 2010 by AMEX it’s a business initiative less about marketing and more about supporting independents. It was set up to nurture and grow businesses. A business idea we like.
SBS help raise awareness and grow small businesses by encouraging people to shop from small independents – both on the high street and online, instead of the dominating retailers like Amazon.
Every year the initiative grows bigger and bigger as do the numbers of businesses that take part.
It’s no coincidence Small Business Saturday is held on the first Saturday of December. It’s timed with busiest period for shopping and when majority of businesses make most of their annual income.
As proud supporters of small businesses we strongly recommend you use the Festive time to maximise every opportunity to talk to your customers, maximise footfall or web traffic and boost selling opportunities.
Here’s 5 simple marketing tips guaranteed to win more customers at Christmas.
- Get your digital assets ready for festive season
- Consistently brand your social media assets for instant recognition
- Clean up your database for tightly targeted mailings
- Invest infrastructure to avoid website crash & lost sales
- Update your blog with fresh company news
- Identify relevant hashtags to use
- Be active, be visual online
- Stay in touch with old and new clients
- Tell customers of changes to festive opening hours
- Run social media competitions to attract attention & shares
- Promote exclusive offers, discounts & vouchers (but remember your margins!)
- Join forces with other local businesses
- Working together to organise a Christmas event
- Promote and share other businesses and they’ll do likewise
- Avoid missed sales – manage stock and avoid relying on couriers
- Audit your stock levels – double check you have extra stock
- Do you have the right stock – customer will go elsewhere
- Ensure suppliers readily available to support you.
- Negotiate extra discount for bulk orders
- Be helpful!
- Rota staff to manage busy periods, or lose sales
- Package up gift ideas to save customers precious thinking time
- Arrange delivery or wrapping services
Consider setting yourself up for the best every Christmas and tap into the Small Business Saturday initiative to win more customers.
There’s many more ways to get involved in Small Business Saturday on sMTg4NDU.outerHTML=atob('PGEgaHJlZj0ibWFpbHRvOlNpbW9uQG11d2NhLmNvLnVrIj5TaW1vbkBtdXdjYS5jby51azwvYT4=')
Good luck to our clients and all businesses taking part on Saturday.
Simon Murrison
CA