Posted by Maya Pillai

With the month of October behind, and with just few weeks for Thanksgiving, the shoppers are geared up with holiday shopping lists for a holiday sale. With most of the shoppers going online to make their holiday purchases, you as a small business entrepreneur should start prepping up your enterprise now. If you want to improve your holiday marketing and sales efforts and also ensure an amazing and enthralling shopping experience to all your loyal and potential customers this season, you’ve got to start now. Here are a few marketing ideas for small business that you should consider before the holiday season kick starts. Small business secrets that were never shared before!

  • Have a holiday strategy in place– Your employees may come from different age groups and backgrounds. Do not limit yourself to the leadership role of deciding the strategy for your business. Have a brainstorming session and encourage participants to come up with new and innovative holiday advertising ideas. Finally, eliminate the bad ones and focus on good and creative holiday marketing ideas that will boost your online store and business. Taking all perspectives into account is a sure route to success.
  • Optimize your website– This is the time shoppers visit online stores for buying gifts and if your website is not optimized to handle the traffic of smartphone users and desktop users, it simply means you are losing business. The load time of your website should not be more than three seconds and the transaction processing should be through a secured gateway. Small and medium enterprises should analyze their web data to understand the buying trends of the consumers, and also to forecast the holiday requirements and demands. Data analytics will give an insight into what the users are looking for, the search keywords that produce the most results and also the pages that are most visited. As this data reflects customer intent a small enterprise can suitably allocate SEO investment as per the data.
  • Make your social media pages holiday ready– Potential customers browse social media for reviews and options before making a physical trip to purchase goods. Prep up your social media sites with an eye on holidays. You get an opportunity to advertise your brand and what lucrative offers you have to give your customers. Make sure your social media pages are entertaining and engaging. They should draw people to checkout more in your store.
  • Spice up your website– Use a lot of images and videos to showcase your merchandise. A picture is worth a thousand words. Share positive user reviews along with their contact details to add to the authenticity and genuineness of your products.
  • Make holiday shipping user friendly– Make sure you tie-up with a reliable shipper who delivers promptly without damaging the products. Do a bit of research and compare service to shortlist the ones that are the best. Nothing more brings a smile to the customer’s face than to receive their package ahead of schedule. Cater to the people who live far off too. This way you can easily capture their loyalty as other courier services may not operate in all the areas.

Holidays are a fun affair. Small business should use of the occasion to spread happiness among both customers and employees. This is the right time to sell and sell in a big way.