There’s a reason Costco already has their holiday items out!
Retailers make as much as 40% of their annual sales during the holiday season.
That number varies by industry, of course, with toys often topping the charts:
Most business owners are aware of the potential numbers, but many would be surprised to see how early that gift buying begins:
As this is written, it is mid-October, so if you haven’t started marketing for the holidays yet, the clock is ticking! As you can see from the graph, consumers are starting their shopping earlier and earlier.
Also remember that marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. One ad isn’t going to cut it. Consumers often need 6 to 9 contacts (hearing about you or from you) before they can draw the dots between their needs and your solutions. Happily, holiday shopping may trim those numbers a bit as consumers strive to complete their gift list purchases ASAP, but nonetheless, marketing is a process, not a one-off project.
Some best practices:
- Know what you can afford. Small business can typically budget 2% to 4% of annual sales towards marketing. Thus, if you see $800,000 in annual sales, you’re looking at an ANNUAL budget of $16,000 to $32,000. If you intend to spend 40% of your annual budget during the holidays, that’s $6,400 to $12,800 towards holiday marketing. Sorry, but you’re not doing radio or TV commercials with that budget. You need to be creative and market with precision.
- Know your target market. The KC Metro has 1.5+ million people, and given the budgets above, you can’t reach them all. That’s why you want to develop one or a couple customer personae, where we look at the age, gender, hot buttons, interests and locations of your target customer(s). Much of marketing is accomplished on social media today, and your small business can utilize their big data to get your marketing in front of the right people.
- Know where they are looking, and when. On many social media platforms, you can get useful intel about when your followers are most frequently on-line so that you can time your posts and ads.
- Advertising must be consistent, or you’re starting all over again. Logos, colors, copy and branding should all be uniform.
- Any ad should include a “call to action,” where you tell the consumer what you want them to do: visit your store, click, call, etc. An ad that lacks a call to action basically says, “we’re here, whenever” but it is unlikely to get a prospective customer to take an action that results in a purchase.
- Ads and posts must be engaging. Engagement is actually a metric that social media platforms measure and track in order to know whose ads to feature prominently. You will need to stand out. One last graph to make our point, e-mail traffic at year end:
EVERYONE is trying to reach the same consumers around Black Friday – the traffic is nearly off the chart! That’s yet another reason to start early! Start your holiday marketing marathon now to make sure that your holiday is ho-ho-ho and not ho-hum!
