What To Do With Your Marketing During The Holiday Season

By the time you read this we will be past Thanksgiving and looking at 2012. Hopefully, you have or are planning to take some time off for the holiday season, but not time off from marketing your business.
A common misconception during the holiday season is that nobody's doing any business or paying attention to anything but partying and spending time with family and friends. While it's certainly true that people are doing that, if you aren't marketing and communicating with your clients during this, and every holiday season, you are making a big mistake.

While people are relaxing a little more than usual, and not concentrating on their businesses as much, it's a great time for you to be doing more marketing and staying in front of your clients, if for no other reason than they have more time, are less stressed and not so busily running through their days that they miss an important message from you.

Marketing Solutions. Your messages will stand out more simply because everyone else is doing less - your messages will more easily cut through the clutter because there is less of it there.

A mentor of mine advises to look and see what the masses are doing and then do the opposite. The holiday season is a time when this is particularly true, because so many businesses aren't doing anything during this time. It makes it a lot easier for you to get attention and make sales.

The other huge advantage you have by marketing and continuing to reach out to your clients during the holiday season is that it's a great set up time for the New Year. While all your competitors are eating and drinking and playing, you're already set-up for a great January because of the marketing and work you put in November and December. Since you never stopped your marketing efforts, you don't have to take the time to gear back up after the holidays and re-build your momentum - because you never lost yours to begin with.

To a large degree, we get what we expect in business, and in life, so if you expect your business to drop off during the holiday season, it probably will. If, however, you expect to keep doing business as usual, then you will probably get that result. While others are wondering what to do for the New Year and how to have a better year next year than this year, you're still marketing, planning, developing new programs and services, and generally working IN your business, watching your year-end numbers grow and your business flourish.
At the very least, during the holiday season, if you do have some slower times than you want, take the time to put together your marketing plan for the next quarter or the next year, review your operations and systems to see what needs to be changed and updated, spend some time meeting with your key staff members for some strategic planning, and get ready so that when January rolls around, you're already ahead of everyone else.
Remember to look outside your industry for marketing and business examples and not inside your industry all the time. You'll get better ideas, be more creative, and because you can S & D (Swipe & Deploy) what you learn there, it will take you less time and effort to carry out what you see somewhere else than it would if you had to develop, plan, start and execute your own original plan from scratch.

As the leader of your business, your staff will follow your lead, so if you're marketing and planning during this holiday season and they see you're looking forward to a boom in business next year, they'll pitch in, they will follow your lead, and they will help you make all those goals and plans happen with you.

Keep marketing during this and every holiday season... it really will land you ahead of the pack.

Also make sure you take some time to enjoy the season and all it brings, spend some extra time with your family and friends, take some extra time off to recoup and rejuvenate so when the New Year arrives, you're fresh, rested and ready for a banner year!

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2 Methods for Promoting Your Business Offline

Online Services. Promoting your business during the Christmas season is important. If you don't share what you offer with others they're not going to know you have the ability to help them in their time of need. You must show them what you offer and how you can help them.

There are so many ways to promote your holiday specials. Some of the most popular ways include article marketing, blog posts, and website content. Using these methods will help you to easily promote your products and increase the traffic to your site.

While it's important to use these methods to promote your products or services, it's also important to use other methods as well. You want to make sure you use all possible methods to promote what you offer so you can have the most success possible. This may be difficult to do, but you must get it done so you can reach your goals.

One way to promote your products or services other than using article marketing, blog posts, and website content is to promote them locally. It doesn't matter what type of business you run, you can always use local customers or clients. So why not use this type of marketing to grow your business during the holiday season? If you don't use this type of marketing, you should start immediately.

There are numerous ways to promote your business locally. The first method that's easy to do is to attend networking events. These might be called business after hours or breakfast before business. If you don't have these types of meetings, check with the Chamber of Commerce to see if your community offers any type of event like this on a monthly basis.

The second method to promote your products or services is to hold an in-home event. While this is a little more difficult if you offer services, it is still possible. You'll want to have information to pass out to those that attend your event and you'll need to have a speech of some sort prepared so you can explain what you offer and how you can help people with what you offer.

Promoting your business online isn't the only way to grow. Using offline methods such as the ones listed above or others you can come up with will help you to increase the traffic to your site and to reach your goals.

Read More: artsoft solutions

6 Things You Can Learn from Groupon's Marketing

I've been on Groupon's mailing list for a little while and have noticed their freakishly fast growth. I wondered if there were some magical marketing ideas that I could glean from them. So, in the spirit of "talent borrows; genius steals", here are 6 things that we can all learn from Groupon's marketing machine: Outsourcing Services

1. Have a Mobile Version of Your Website... That Works.
I'm not sure how else to say this, so, a lot of mobile websites suck. They are hard to use, they don't have all the main features of the full site or they have features that don't work. Groupon's mobile website, however, is like a cool ocean breeze on a hot day of bad web programming.

This dawned on me the other day when I opened a Groupon e-mail on my iPhone and clicked (tapped?) a link. Up came my browser with the expected content in a readable font with a few, big buttons as calls to action that gave me all the options I needed and wanted (including a large "Buy Now" button, since that's what they ultimately want users to do). 

And that is exactly what we need in our mobile sites: speed, clarity of content, big, easy-to-tap buttons and relevant calls to action that look good on a phone.

2. Be Consistent
Green and dark gray. That's who Groupon is. From their e-mails to their website to their mobile app, you are always well aware that you still in the Groupon 'system.' And it's basically seamless - the image they use in the e-mail is the same image you see on the landing page and is the same image they use in the app. Why? So users don't get lost.

I'm going to say that again "they are consistent so their users don't get lost." No one wants to reorient themselves when they click a link - they'll just leave your site and find another that is more simple; and trust me, there are other sites that do what you do.

3. Focus Your Message
Why do people use Groupon? To buy products and services at a discount. So, why would Groupon want to talk about or promote anything else?
They wouldn't.
And they don't.
I'm not sure I can be any clearer than that.

4. Maintain a High Level of Quality
I would never dream of seeing an e-mail from Groupon with a typo - maybe it happens, but it would definitely be the exception. Their bar-setting quality standards go beyond just making sure they've proof-read their communications (I mean, we all do that... right?); their clean, high-quality look is accentuated in their layouts, choice of colors and images they use for their deals.

Let me be bold enough to say, "If you don't have a super-creative graphic designer on your marketing team, you need to hire one or get a contract with an outside agency." It's no coincidence that Groupon's website conforms to the 960 Grid System (www.960.gs) or that their main color is green (the color of cash); most importantly, it's no accident that they proof-read their writing. It's a very intentional level of quality from very creative, very professional graphic artists and writers. And you need some of those.

5. Participate on Facebook A LOT
Groupon posts a status update every couple of hours - from links to their deals to job listings to videos of llamas, they are active with share-able content and their followers love them for it.

Their sales team loves them for it, too. Why? Because they are keeping Groupon top-of-mind for their customers and giving people ample opportunity to share a Facebook post with their friends, thus getting more fans. Sales people love fans because fans buy things.

I'm not suggesting you start posting non-sense on your Facebook wall - but if you want people to talk about you, and interact with you, you need to post things that your target audience will enjoy reading and, more importantly, sharing. And you need to do it with a frequency that lets people know you're still there.

6. Have Fun with It
I would like to draw your attention to the fact that Groupon shared a link on Facebook to a video of a llama and a cat interacting with each other. On top of that, their posts look like they were written by a real person.
That might be the bigger thing to remember - your customers are real people and they expect to interact with real people. The best way for you to show that your company is full of real people is when you can have fun with what you do. You don't have to post links to llamas on your Facebook page or website, but you need to find a way to bring a human-touch back to your marketing.

Read More: artsoft