Marketing Strategy for the Holiday Season 2020: A Short Guide for Small Businesses

In general, businesses are having a tough time trying to stay afloat due to the coronavirus pandemic, but that does not mean all is lost. Small businesses have suffered much compared to larger and more successful businesses, and they can only survive this predicament if they dare to think outside the box.

While larger businesses can tolerate losses, small businesses lack the resilience to survive serious setbacks. As a result, it is imperative for small businesses to adopt new and innovative strategies to pull through tough times relatively unscathed. Indeed, if said small businesses go the extra mile, they can increase their profitability even during these testing times.

If you own a small business and are looking for ways to charge through the COVID-19-stricken holiday season, then this marketing strategy will allow your small business to survive and even thrive during the ongoing pandemic.

So without further ado, let’s dig in.

Focus on Creating Value for Customers

The holidays are a joyful time, but it can present customers with certain mild stresses such as when they shop for gifts. You can eliminate customer stress by providing useful suggestions and tips to make their experience better.

Let’s take a supermarket as an example. A supermarket could provide simple cooking recipes to make cooking for the holidays a breeze. Apart from being incredibly useful to their customers, it would motivate their customers to purchase from them.

Businesses need to deliver content that relates to their products or services in terms of their customers’ needs. Before developing content for the holiday season, you need to ask yourself “how it will benefit your customers”? It’s not enough to simply publish content on a blog just for the heck of it. Your content should be written with clear intent, bearing in mind the needs and problems of your customers. You can only be useful to your customers and provide valuable solutions if you know what their problems are.

Remember, only promote your products or services in your content marketing if it makes sense. Forcing your products or services in your content can have the opposite of what you hope to achieve, so don’t get overboard with self-promotion. 

Show Gratitude to Customers

During the holidays, customers spend a considerable amount of time determining what and where they want to spend their money on. This means even long-term and loyal customers could decide to shop elsewhere if they so desire. To pull old customers back to your business, you will need to increase your visibility.

Although increased visibility can help keep your customers loyal, it won’t do much if you do not show gratitude to your customers. Making your customers feel valued and respected is the best retention tactic there is.

There are different ways you can thank your customers, such as:

• Giving physical cards
• Sending thank you emails 

By doing something simple as thanking your customers wholeheartedly, you encourage them to choose your business to shop for gifts in the future as well. This is even more important now considering how people have smaller savings due to the coronavirus pandemic. If they choose to do business with you even during the current economic hardship, they ought to be thanked for it since they have plenty of other businesses to choose from, offering similar deals as you.

Offer Rewards

Customers may be solely focused on purchasing gifts, but they will be open to the idea of buying something for themselves. For this reason, it is a good idea to offer a purchase gift or free rewards to keep them interested.

By adopting this simple tactic, you motivate your customers to buy from your business and even spend more money. For instance, if you offer a free item with a $75 purchase, it will encourage your customers to spend more. Instead of spending $30, they would most likely spend $75 to get the free item.

Of course, all small businesses can’t offer rewards during the pandemic. In this case, they could offer free shipping instead.

The holidays are all about spreading happiness and giving to others – and your customers will want to be on the receiving end every now and then. This is more than enough reason to offer free rewards or purchase gifts, if possible. Also, make it a point to highlight savings, special offers, and promotions to increase your sales during the holiday season.

Take Advantage of Email Marketing

During the holiday season, your customers will always be on the move. They could be running errands or out shopping for gifts. As such, they are unlikely to have time to entertain physical mail, personal encounters, or phone calls. One thing is for sure though; your potential customers are constantly checking their email.

Businesses tend to send tons of offers during Christmas and the holiday season, which is why customers check their email quite frequently. Your potential customers will want the best deal, and this is where email marketing can be of great use to you.

Enough emphasis cannot be placed on the fact that you should notify your subscribers about sales, promotions, and rewards. Believe it or not, a simple email informing and encouraging potential customers can make all the difference in the world to increase sales.

Use Relevant Hashtags on Social Media

Considering that 81% of people have social media profiles, you do not want to miss out on the opportunity to reach out and influence your target audience. If you are already taking advantage of social media marketing, you should further optimize it for the holiday season. One such way of making this possible is by using relevant hashtags.

Take advantage of relevant hashtags on platforms like Twitter and Instagram. You could use hashtags on Facebook too, but they will not deliver the same as some other platforms. The idea here is to make the most of hashtags where they will have the most impact.

When you use hashtags, you can notify your potential customers about promotions and sales. To take things up a notch, you could also encourage social media users to create content using hashtags when posting a status or photo with your product.

Hashtags are a lot easier to remember, making it easier for your potential customers to remember your brand.

Wrapping Up

With the right plan, your small business can develop a one-of-a-kind marketing strategy for the holiday season that will drive your sales upward. From using relevant hashtags to expressing gratitude to your customers, your business has quite a few options to perform exceptionally well during the holiday season, even when things may not seem favorable due to COVID-19.