Is a Holiday Marketing Campaign Right for Your Business?

Drowning in holiday marketing emails? Wondering if your small business should join the holiday promotional mayhem? While everyone else is rushing to create Black Friday deals and holiday promotions, you might be questioning if it's really worth the effort (and the cost).

This episode breaks down the real pros and cons of holiday marketing (without the sugar coating), plus creative alternatives if you decide to skip the seasonal rush. It's perfect for business owners who want to make smart decisions, not just follow the crowd. You'll learn how to evaluate if holiday marketing makes sense for your business and discover strategic alternatives that might work better for you.

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EPISODE 144.
Read the show notes and view the full transcript here: https://erinollila.com/holiday-marketing-for-small-businesses-episode/

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Here's info on your host, Erin Ollila
Erin Ollila believes in the power of words and how a message can inform – and even transform – its intended audience. She graduated from Fairfield University with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and went on to co-found Spry, an award-winning online literary journal.

When Erin’s not helping her clients understand their website data or improve their website copy, you can catch her hosting the Talk Copy to Me podcast and guesting on shows such as Profit is a Choice, Mindful Marketing, The Power in Purpose, and Business-First Creatives.

Stay in touch with Erin Ollila, SEO website copywriter:
• Learn more about Erin’s VIP intensive options if you’d like to learn more about how you can hire her to help you with your marketing efforts
• Visit Erin's website to learn more about her business, services, and products
• Come chat with Erin on Threads, Instagram, or LinkedIn

Transcript

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Ever feel like your inbox is drowning in holiday promotions? Like every business on the planet is screaming buy now! Limited time offer. Today, we're tackling the big question. Should your business join in on holiday marketing? Or should you? Should you sit this one out? Hey friends, we've already made it into December and this episode came to me because I was sifting through my November emails and realized I had received so many Black Friday emails way earlier.. And let me tell you, people laid that marketing and sales on thick. But here is the thing. What works for the really huge brands like Amazon and Target, Old Navy, isn't what's going to work for your business. So it is really important to identify whether holiday marketing is smart, for the business that you're running. I'm not here in this episode to tell you whether or not you should jump into holiday marketing. Instead, I'm going to walk you through both sides of this story so you can make the right call for your business. So, before we even begin, let's talk about what we're actually dealing with here. I hinted at this when I complained about the massive amount of emails I received from the beginning of November all the way through now, almost mid December. And that's because holiday spending jumps a huge amount compared to the regular months in the year. And holiday marketing isn't just Black Friday or Cyber Monday. We're looking at everything from Halloween promotions, early bird Christmas deals, small business Saturday. Giving Tuesday, Last Minute Holiday Pushes, and New Year's Campaigns. And if we're going to make this episode a little bit more evergreen, it could be any of the holidays that we have to factor into our selling and marketing plans. Episode is broken up into two parts. First, we'll talk about the good parts of selling and marketing during the holidays. Then, we'll talk about why selling and marketing in the holidays is important. isn't necessarily the best idea. From there, I will give you some key ways to consider how you can make the decision for yourself, as well as some alternative approaches to selling that might make you feel a little bit more excited to either skip the holiday marketing time, time of year, or to actually go all in and market and sell for your business during the holiday season. But before I begin, I have some absolutely unscientific data to share with you. When I knew I was going to shift my content calendar a bit and Sneak this episode in here. I went on threads and LinkedIn and asked my audience if they could take a second to vote on whether or not they plan to market and sell during the holiday season. Actually, now I'm just remembering I did this in my email too. So I'm actually going to pause the recording in a second to go get my. But let's talk about social media first. I say that this is unscientific data because the pool of respondents is absolutely minuscule. On threads, there were 19 votes and on LinkedIn, there were only three votes., first we'll start with the options. The options were, yes, I'm selling hard. option B is that I'm marketing only. Option C is that, to be honest, they're on the fence. And option D is, nah, I'm slowing down. See you in 2025. Here's what's interesting. Back to the point. The answers were incredibly varied on LinkedIn. Actually, this is one of the more funny, funny options of those four votes. The first three all got one vote, so they're tied 33 percent all the way around. And one person commented on the poll to say that if the poll hadn't closed in 24 hours, they probably would have voted for option number four, which meant every single one of the options on LinkedIn would have gotten a quarter of the votes. Threads was slightly more varied. Selling Hard came in at 26%. Um, as well as, No, I'm Slowing Down, See You in 2025, came in at 26%. The third option was, I'm on the Fence, to be honest, at 16%. And the leader of this, , fun group of four is Marketing Only. And that's only a slight bump between the other two 26 percenters, and this one's coming in at 32 percent. So, I say this is a completely unscientific poll. Both of them were up for only 24 hours. I only tagged a small group of people in my audience who I knew would share some feedback. And as you can see, People are varied. Some people really love selling during the holidays. Some people want nothing to do with it, and everyone else is just kind of in the middle of that mix. Let's take a second and see what my email list said about this poll. Okay, also, like social media, incredibly low number of respondents. Only six people actually responded to the poll in this email. And it was split, interestingly, two of the answers were split at 16. 7 percent being I'm not sure on the fence and nope, I'm not wasting my time. See you in 2025. And then , another tie., yes, I plan to continue marketing and selling and I plan to keep marketing, but not actively selling are tied at 33%. So again, I just share these numbers to reiterate that there's no right or wrong answer. So now that we've gone over my scientific data for you, let's jump into the good side of selling and marketing during the holiday season. There are three key advantages that make this season really unique for businesses. First, You've got Increased Consumer Spending Mindset. People are literally planning on spending more money at this time of the year. They've got their list ready, they're expecting deals, and many have set aside actual holiday shopping budgets, whether that's in the bank or in their head, so that they can do the shopping or do the investing that they're choosing to do. Honestly, it's the one time of year where consumers are actively looking for reasons to buy. Second, You actually have built in urgency and deadlines during a holiday season. When else during the year do you have such a natural countdown timer? You know, for example, order by December 15th for Christmas delivery, or, , last chance for holiday appointments actually mean something to the people who see those messages. They don't feel like false urgency. It's very clear that if you don't order by a certain date, you may not receive that product in time for your holiday celebration or even for the holiday appointments example. It's clear that you have your own calendar, your own schedule, and your own timeline for working so people know that they need to get on that now or they may need to wait until next year. And third, there's a real opportunity to stand out and If you do things right with your selling and marketing. While everyone is out there screaming about the discounts that they're offering, you could be the business that offers something different. And speaking of standing out, I have a few examples for you. About how that could work. Yes. Yes, I know. Erin loves examples. First, imagine a local bakery that opens pre orders for holiday treats. They're not competing with the Black Friday chaos. Instead, they're giving their customers exactly what they need. Guaranteed fresh baked goods for holiday parties without any of that last minute chaos. Or consider a website designer who offers new year, new site packages. This brings us actually, I should mention to a fourth advantage, the year end budget spending. And this is especially true in the B2B service space or even, even the SaaS space companies often need to use their annual budget before December 31st or they'll lose the money that has been set aside. That is a powerful motivation for business customers to make decisions now rather than later. Okay, another example for you. Picture a handmade jewelry artist who really changes their holiday marketing into a gift giving guidance system. So they're not hardcore selling. They're not creating launch sequences. They're literally shifting the mindset from sell to sell. to Inspire, let's say, or Sell to Help. What they're doing is creating a gift guide for different types of recipients. And that makes it really easy for overwhelmed shoppers to find the perfect piece of jewelry because they're narrowing down the selection for them. Alright, we've talked about why holiday marketing and selling is a great idea. Let's talk now about why it's not such a good idea. The first up is, is something that really hits your financial bottom line. And that is increased ad costs and competition. Everyone. And I mean everyone. Everyone is marketing at the same time. I can't tell you of all those hundreds of emails I talked about at the beginning of this episode, I can't tell you how many of them came from names that I do not think I have heard from this entire year. And I say that with confidence because there were a few names that, I had no clue who they were. So I actually did some research. I searched my inboxes for their email. I searched for their business name and I found one, two, maybe only three emails from them for the entire time I've been on their list. People come out of the woodwork to market during the holiday season. And even if you have a strategic system for selling and marketing for your business, you're not just competing against everyone you normally compete against, you're competing against those people who hide in the work, woodwork at the very same time. Your perfectly crafted email is sitting in an inbox next to hundreds of other emails. Your social media posts that you work so hard on are competing with a ton of holiday content. And if you're running paid ads Those ads gonna cost you double or even triple during peak holiday seasons. This is leading to our second challenge. The very real risk of getting lost in the noise. When every business is screaming, buy now, your customers might just decide to stop listening altogether. It's like trying to have a conversation in an extremely crowded room where everyone is shouting back and forth to each other. At some point you just give up and you kind of give each other the nudge to say like, we'll talk about this in a little while. Well, you don't have that opportunity to say that to your audience. So what you're doing again is just screaming into a void if your competition is extremely high during the holiday season. Alright, let's move on to the third challenge, and that's the potential strain on resources and inventory. So we're talking about creating holiday specific content, managing increased customer service demands, potentially dealing with shipping delays, which are,, Out of your hands, once you drop that off to the post office, and making sure that you have enough stock without overbuying so that you don't have a ton of extra stock on your hands after the holidays. So one little miscalculation in inventory could mean Either disappointing your customers or being stuck with that excess alright, finally, let's talk about something that gets often overlooked and that's the impact on the work life balance during the holidays. Running a marketing campaign means being on during a time that you and your team may actually want to take some time off and enjoy the season. It means monitoring those campaigns, responding to customer questions, Managing fulfillment when others are at parties or they're spending time with their own families. So it really means that you're investing a lot of your time and energy into taking this strategy that you have of selling during the holiday season and making it work, making it successful. So Again, that could be a pro. You might want to invest a lot of time at this one specific point in the year, and it might pay off really well for you, but it might not. I gave you the pros, I gave you the cons, and now the decision is in your hands. How do you decide if holiday marketing is right for your business? Let's break the decision down into three key considerations. First, think about your business type. Are you selling something that naturally fits into like holiday shopping behavior? Be honest here. Not every business needs to force itself into the holiday narrative. As a copywriter, for example, I may fit my business into a year end narrative where, again, , bigger businesses and brands are trying to spend down their budgets and they want to hire me to do some content work or, , copywriting updates for them. last minute so that they can spend their budgets. That's a potential entryway for me being in the holiday season. But for the rest of the season, there's nothing super festive about writing and marketing. However. If you make hot chocolate mix, yeah, it's a good time of year. People like hot chocolate during the holidays. If you make gourmet candy and candy canes are one of your big sellers every year. Yeah, you have the business type that is great to sell during the holidays. Maybe you're in the memory industry and you make photo books or you make personalized calendars. Again, great time to be in business during the holidays. But because your services may be,, influencing the amount of work that you can take on the holidays, you should factor that into the business type and the time that you have as well. So next we're going to look at your resources. Cause that's kind of what I just meant by that. I'm not talking about your marketing budget. Do you have the time? The energy and the systems in place to handle a holiday push for your business. Remember, if you don't, it might just be better to skip the holiday marketing than do it poorly. If you have a business that has,, inventory of lower price products, let's just say Christmas ornaments, for an example, and you personalize them. If you don't have enough of the product that you're able to personalize in time, let's say, to be able to create the product, do the personalization, get them into the postal mail before the post office tells you like their cutoff is for guaranteed Christmas delivery, you might actually be hugely straining your own resources. All right, and finally, let's talk about customer patterns. So not you, your customers. When do they typically buy? What problems are they actively trying to solve during the holidays? And this problem could be just purchasing presents, if you want to make, take an easy example here, or it could be that they have things that they're trying to accomplish. So sometimes just knowing what your customers actually want from you, it gives you insight on how you can zig when everyone else is zagging, how you can craft holiday campaigns that feel right for you because it's what your customers need. So, Speaking of zinging when others are zagging, I actually kind of hate that saying. I don't know why. I would just said it twice on this podcast., let's explore some different approaches that might work for your business than a traditional holiday marketing campaign. First, there's the strategic timing approach.. Can you target the pre holiday sweet spot? One way to think about timing. Let's take an example here. A personal trainer could launch a pre resolution program in early December. Think about it. They would catch people before the holiday stress hits full force. With practically zero competition, this would work especially great for a body positive personal trainer because you could avoid all of the pain point marketing and shame marketing of talking about people overeating during the holiday season or anything like that. And instead lead with the messaging of, enjoy your holiday season., let's keep up the consistent work you've been doing so far., it could be a great time to retarget, , previous clients who worked with you as a personal trainer. And again, congratulate them for all the work that they've been doing and just let them know, , if you want to strengthen up during the holiday season, now's the time. Alright, so let's talk about another approach to the holiday marketing flow. And that could be doing the networking now and profiting from the networking later. Imagine a spa owner who used the quiet holiday season to build relationships with other local businesses. Instead of trying to push their services, let's say, , maybe they're maxed out on services. Maybe all of their employees are already really booked for the holiday season. So they are feeling the stress of people wanting to come in instead of selling and marketing what they could do. It is build up these relationships with other businesses for a future promotion. So while everyone else is pushing holiday sales, this spa could be planning joint Valentine's day promotions with complimentary businesses. You know, that's playing the long game and still investing in your marketing without really doing any selling, which is kind of like those four examples I gave my audience. That's what would fall into a market, but not sell as an example., A different approach could be focusing on gratitude instead of sales. Instead of holiday promotions, a graphic designer could send personalized year in review client appreciation gifts. This focuses on strengthening relationships while everyone else is just trying to make a quick sale with their audience. Additionally, by Re engaging the relationship with former clients at the end of the year. What you're doing is reintroducing yourself into their life. It doesn't mean that they forgot about you if they haven't heard from you since March or July, let's say. It means that you're making yourself front and center for them. So that graphic designer is kind of tapping them on the shoulder with a sweet gift to reinforce two things. One, we have a great relationship. I'm so fortunate for you, which makes their client feel good. And two, I did good work for you. Do you want to do more good work together? I'm not suggesting you say that outright in the message that you send with the gift, but just by again, putting yourself out there, you're reminding that former client that you could do more work for them in the future. And my final to the holiday marketing, traditional Black Friday, Cyber Monday, end of Christmas season sales is to save your energy for your true peak season. So picture a wedding photographer who completely ignores the holiday marketing rush. Well, they could do that because their peak season hits after the holidays, when all of those Christmas and New Year's and Valentine's Day engagement engagements happen, and they're getting booked up to do engagement photo shoots. They could save their marketing budget for January through April when they have way less competition. And could potentially have a lot more like strategic campaigns or higher ad spend to get those newly engaged people into their doors. Alright, that's it for today's episode, friends. Again, there's no wrong way to do this. There is no right way to do this. And it's, it's okay to choose to go all in on holiday marketing or to tell yourself that this is not the year that holiday marketing works for you. It's also really okay to facilitate between the two year after year. I thought for sure mid year this year that I would do a huge Black Friday push. The closer we got to this time of year, the more I knew that those fun ideas that I had just weren't actually aligned with the time I had or what I was just interested in doing at this time of the year. Does that mean I can't have a Black Friday sale next year? No. Does that mean I have to have a Black Friday sale next year? And the same goes for you. You can have a Black Friday sale. You can have any type of holiday season sales, New Year's sales, any of these things. You can go all in on holiday marketing and selling. But you also don't have to. So, what matters most is that your strategy aligns with your business goals and your personal capacity. Got that? Personal capacity. Success is not about following the crowd. Even though you might have that FOMO of seeing all of your friends or competitors putting their best, , launches out there. What it's about is making intentional choices that work for you, your team if you have one, and your leads and customers. See you next week where we keep talking copy.