The holiday season is alive and kicking, and you need to prepare now or it will be too late. As the days get shorter, expect your schedule to get packed as holidays will come up back to back for your retail store. Halloween, Black Friday and Christmas are all excellent opportunities to find new customers of your store.
In this blog post, we’ll talk about the different ways you can use a mix of both offline and online marketing to achieve your goals.
Start with a marketing plan
Time and resources come in finite doses, so you need to manage both to make the best of the season. When creating a marketing plan, keep the nature of your store and your audience in mind. For example, if you’re running an online store, you’ll be interested in online advertising as opposed to local advertisements.
If you have a physical store, decorating your storefront, using flyers and collaborating with a local charity would be higher up your priorities.
And you need to know your audience intimately so you target the right channels, use the right language and offer the correct products to gain their interest. We’ve done a complete blog post outlining how you can find your audience.
Make a holiday gift guide
Here’s a little thing that can ease up the customer journey – a holiday gift guide! When entering a store, your customer has a vague idea of the gift they want to purchase. They know who to get the gift for, but not the what. That’s where your list comes in. Your holiday gift guide can give gift suggestions for:
- Husbands
- Wives
- Fiances
- Parents
- Children
… And you can create further lists based on specific interests. For example, gift suggestions for your nerdy teenage daughter, your mother who’s into crochet or a child who loves Batman.
Holiday guides can be made in a variety of ways, including an email series, or a listicle on your blog, or maybe even both. Browse online to see what your competitors are doing and make a gift guide that works well with your product line-up.
Decorate your storefront
Your storefront is the first thing customers will see, sometimes even from a mile away. It should pique their interest and welcome them at the same time. There’s no single correct way of decorating a storefront and you can either go full maximalist by displaying all kinds of products, or try a more methodical form of decor. What’s important is realizing that:
- Your theme should be made obvious, via visuals associated with the holiday (such as a Frankenstein bust for Halloween)
- It should look good. Get creatives on board to fix your storefront up. A professional hand can make all the difference.
Keep employees happy
A no-brainer, and one that may seem irrelevant to the seasonal buzz. Happy employees matter the whole year around and especially during the holidays because they’ll be spending more time at the store when they could otherwise be spending with family. When a satisfied employee markets your brand, it will always be well received because its genuine.
Not sure what your employees want? Ask them! You’d be surprised what they have to say and you may even discover interesting new ideas to try while you’re at it.
Run Facebook Ads
In 2018, Facebook changed its news feed algorithm to prioritize showing content shared and created by friends over Facebook pages. This means less than 2% of people who’ve liked your Facebook page will see your posts.
The only way left to actually reach users is Facebook ads. The great thing about Facebook Ads is that it allows you to pinpoint your audience, so if you have an avatar for the perfect customer in mind, you can find and target ads specifically to those people.
Curate content on Instagram
Having an aesthetically pleasing Instagram page can get you the right customers, and it won’t cost you an arm and a leg to maintain content. You can do product series for your content, which creates anticipation, helps customers find what they want and makes your page look good. Take a look at what Zara displays their apparel with a nice clean look.
While you’re at it, it’s an absolute necessity to set up shoppable posts on your Instagram page. The first step is to get Instagram Business, then use this guide to set up shoppable posts.
Shoppable posts allow you to add price tags to your Instagram posts, and these allow customers to easily interact and go to the relevant product pages via Instagram.
Create urgency with ads
Correct language use can make a bland-looking ad a lot more interesting. Instill urgency in your customers by announcing a limited time offer, making sure the due date is made obvious. You want customers to make an impulse buy, and adding a date like ‘12/24/2020’ just won’t do the trick. Instead, say 2 days or 48 hours left.
Dates can be vague especially one is not sure about the time, but a more visible time frame such as the number of days or hours often does the trick. This method only works online, because your audience knows when the offer was posted.
And while you’re at it, you want to make sure your ads get noticed. For that, you need to create high quality ads and flyers, which is made quite easy with our retail templates. Choose any of the templates below, customize with your product details, information and pictures (if any), save and download.
Your turn
We’ve talked about a whole lot of ways you can improve your marketing through a variety of techniques. Now it’s your turn to give it a try and see what works best for your store and your audience.
