Are you ready for Small Business Saturday November 29?
Can you believe Thanksgiving is almost on us? The Christmas shopping season hasn’t officially started, but if you’re a small business selling consumer goods or services, your holiday promotion plans should be underway.
Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, of course, are the shopping days known as Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday. Many consumers will look for deals on these days, so this is an opportunity you don’t want to ignore.
Small Business Saturday celebrates local businesses that help make your neighborhood great. It’s your chance to draw more foot traffic and boost your sales in the most important fiscal quarter for many businesses. Consumers like the idea of spending money at local businesses, and they like getting their holiday shopping out of the way. So help them out!
Here are five ways to bring in customers on Small Business Saturday:
1. Do your research, get ready
Decide which products or services you should feature in your Small Business Saturday advertising and social promotions. Research anticipated trends this season, choose several products likely to be in high demand, and include any you expect to discount — those will bring customers into your store, who can then also find your other great products. So next, you should set up your displays and end-caps with another, larger list of trending products — customers are eager to get as much of their list as possible done in one store, so be sure you’re ready to catch their eye and make it easy for them when they come in.
2. Target your online advertising
Using the targeting tools available on social platforms like Facebook and programmatic ad platforms, identify populations who are in your local area, and who are searching keywords related to your holiday product line. Then employ geo-fencing and other hyper-local advertising to serve these customers offers related to their interests. Customers respond to ads that show them what they’re already hoping to buy — so this step is very important. Show your local customers you’re the local place they can find what they want!
3. Build excitement
It’s time to do this now! Besides targeted ads, you need to fire up your social media followers and your loyal customers on your email list. Even if you don’t have products picked and promotions set up, start making noise to build excitement. Just send a 1-sentence teaser if necessary, just to tell them an exciting day is ahead — an event, good deals — to ensure your brand name is front-of-mind as the shopping season starts. Personally reach out to your most avid fans (even if it’s only a few), and friends and family, and ask them to shout out “something’s happening here on Small Business Saturday!”
Of course, pre-promotion isn’t the end; you should be very actively promoting with posts and an email on the Saturday itself (especially if you set up time-specific deals and activities). And as a bonus — now that you’ve attracted new attention on this special day, you can extend some of the same strategies to your new fans through the rest of the holiday season! If you sell online too, keep deals and promotions rolling through Cyber Monday!
4. Make it special, make it an event
To get people excited enough to come out to meet you this one day, you need to make it a special day. In-store demonstrations, how-to workshops, special guest appearances by artists or celebrities — today’s the day to pull several of these tricks out of your hat.
Ideas: Offer special deals for fans who are following you, but only during special unusual opening hours — like a midnight marshmallow roast, or 4:00 am early-riser access to certain in-demand products. Give fans an extra bonus discount if they bring in a friend on Saturday. Promote a contest online, with a big prize of a Santa bag filled with specialties, but only for visitors who come in person on Saturday. Or send every social media follower their own unique coupon; they can find out what their special deal is by coming to the store.
You can also help your customers give to a good cause for the holidays, and entice them to come on this special day, by inviting your favorite local charity to join you on site. The charity can accept donations from your customers, and you can give a percentage of Saturday profits to the cause.
5. Combine efforts with neighbors
Make a plan with other small businesses in your neighborhood to promote Small Business Saturday together. By promoting the same messages at the same time, using traditional media like posters and newspaper ads as well as cross promotion online, you can attract more shoppers to your area because they’ll know their holiday shopping can be easier with lots of businesses offering promotions in a small area. You can even ask for help from your town chamber of commerce, city development office, or local neighborhood association to help amplify the message, or help with legwork like writing promo copy and hanging decorations.
You can also cooperate with neighboring businesses to offer combined deals, coupons or fun games to incentivize customers to visit many stores. You could start a rewards program in which all the stores participate: the more purchases a customer makes at any of the stores, the more discounts she receives at all the stores. Or in a simple coupon-sharing scheme, each store could offer a coupon for the next store down, only available by visiting the store next door. Or you could create a neighborhood game — like bingo or that old McDonald’s Monopoly promotion — where the shopper’s goal is to fill in all the blanks to be eligible for a prize. The shopper visits each store to get a unique stamp to fill in the bingo boards, with a small number of bingo boards paying off with gift certificates.
You can go big with a street fair, or go simple with signage and decorations signifying special shopping days that local news can talk about. Small Business Saturday can be a bigger boost than ever when the whole neighborhood works together to create one big event. Each business benefits from increased exposure to each other’s customers, and your combined voices and budgets will be louder and go farther.
How many shopping days left now? And what’s your plan?
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Who is John Paulsen? A former small-business leader myself, I feel your pain (and joy) and hope you’ll enjoy the blog. I launched and ran a well-regarded production company in San Francisco with a team of 9 brilliant, hard working people. I learned to manage a wide array of tasks a small business must handle — business strategy, facilities design, HR, payroll, taxes, marketing, all the way down to choosing telecom equipment and spec’ing a server system to help my team collaborate in real-time on dense media projects from multiple production rooms. I’ve partnered with and learned from dozens of small business owners.
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