Top Holiday Strategies: Inspiration for Entrepreneurs
December 21, 2012
•AIU Atlanta, AIU Houston, AIU Online, Business, General
• 0 Comments
Businesses tend to work harder on their marketing strategies during the holidays. But it can be difficult to know where to put in the extra effort. If you're a business professional or entrepreneur, you need to be up to date on the latest holiday business trends. Find your inspiration in these top holiday strategies:
Encourage In-store and Online Shopping Equally
While in-store shopping is the traditional way to go, HubSpot’s 47 Stats for Remarkable Holiday Marketing in 2012 claims that 52% of consumers will do their holiday shopping online this year.* Over half of consumers shop online, so a significant amount of your marketing efforts should be online. You can use the following tactics to translate your current in-store marketing efforts to the Web:
- Blog about your products and events
- Engage your customers through social media
- Encourage users to write reviews of your products
HubSpot explains that even if customers don’t purchase online, 51% of shoppers research online and then make purchases in the store. By building your online presence, you offer those shoppers the resources they need to become your customers.
Go Mobile
More and more online shoppers are using mobile devices to do their holiday shopping. If you want to adapt to the online shopping world, you should have a mobile app for your store and a mobile-friendly website. Mobile users still want all of the information that’s available on the full site, so they could lose interest if your mobile resources are lacking. Customer ratings and reviews are viewed by more than two-thirds of online shoppers when researching, so be sure all aspects of your website, including details such as reviews, are mobile-friendly.
Offer Online Deals
Now that online stores have had time to evolve, it’s not enough to simply offer your products online. 47 Stats explains that 80% of online shoppers and 71% of in-store shoppers purchase because of email offers. The Web must become not only an extra store but also a venue for dedicated marketing strategies. Use emails and your homepage to offer online and in-store deals. By streamlining your deals, you might reach twice as many people – online and in-store shoppers – with one sale.
*47 Stats for Remarkable Holiday Marketing in 2012. HubSpot, www.hubspot.com (November 2012). Retrieved from http://cdn1.hubspot.com/hub/53/final_deckv2.pdf