This is the busiest time of the year for the shopping world and a great chance to attract new customers and hit your sales’ goals. How do you make your brand stand out in a sea of mistletoe, Santas, and snowflakes? Here are seven ideas:
Spruce up your site
One of the easiest ways to infuse the holiday spirit into your business is to update your site, social media, and other images to reflect the time of year. It not only gets your customers into the mood for festivity, it shows that you’re active on your sites. You can reuse an adjusted logo and other images every year, so the design cost is definitely worth it. Make sure it fits with your brand and appeals to a wide range of customers, i.e. maybe don’t use anything overtly-religious if that’s not your exclusive audience.
Pump out holiday-relevant content
According to the App Institute, content marketing should be only 20% promotion and 80% content that is useful for your customer’s everyday lives. As an example, if your business sells cooking equipment and other kitchen items, share recipes and holiday baking tips. This is the sort of content customers will be looking for around this time of year, so increase your traffic and drum up sales by appealing to them.
Reward your best customers + social media followers
Check out your social media stats and sales; you’re sure to find that certain customers buy from you a lot and sing your praises. Reward the most engaged fans with digital coupons and coupon codes (if you have an online store) and/or print-at-home coupons they can use at your physical store.
Team up with a local charity
Christmas is a time when generosity flows freely, and you can get your name and mission out there by partnering up with a local charity. Now, this isn’t an opportunity to promote your products or your brand; you should definitely chose a charity that’s doing good work because you feel passionate about it, but it does show your customers your heart. They will remember this in the future and think, “Hey, this is a business that cares about the good of the community. I should support them.”
Hold a contest
Give small, affordable gifts for stockings, office parties, host/hostess trinkets.
Everyone loves free stuff and there’s no better way to get potential customers’ attention than by offering it to them. Hold a seasonal contest that gets them engaged with your brand. You’ll see this a lot on Instagram. For example, a candy company will ask people to tag three friends who love chocolate in addition to liking the post, and that’s their submission for a gift box of seasonal candy flavors. Other ideas can include posting photos of ugly Christmas sweaters (for a clothing company) and so on. Be sure to choose a winner quickly after submissions close and announce it on your page, so people know it was a legit contest.
Have “stocking stuffers” readily available
People always need small, affordable gifts for stockings, office parties, host/hostess trinkets, and more this time of year, so be sure to highlight these, whether your store is brick-and-mortar or exclusively online. For online stores, you can use a recommendation system that suggests these small items for customers as they’re checking out, so all they have to do it click on them to add to their cart. For physical stores, stocking stuffers should be right by the cashiers, so people can grab them at the last minute. Be sure to also have gift cards front and center.
Don’t forget atmosphere
Decorating is more of a concern for brick-and-mortars (the adjusted sites design is the online equivalent), and it can make a big difference for customers. Warm up these dark days with more lights and votive candles, add a gift-wrapping service, and set up some greenery. Any decorations you do should fit with the overall look of the store. When should the holiday stuff go up and when should you take them down? That’s up to you, though many like to wait until Thanksgiving is over before putting up the Christmas stuff. If you don’t have Thanksgiving decorations and want to do something before that starting time, it’s hard to go wrong with simple white lights.
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