Marketing from the Car

Holiday Promotion Ideas for Local Communities and Small Businesses, Episode 3

• Brian

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0:00 | 7:50

The holiday season is your biggest opportunity to create momentum - if you do it right.

In this episode, Brian Ostrovsky (creator of Marketing 3-4-5™ and founder of Locable) shares practical, creative, and proven ideas that Main Streets, Chambers, DMOs, and small businesses can use to turn the holidays into a marketing engine.

This episode covers:

  • How to use seasonal content to support your local businesses
  • Promotion ideas like 12 Days of Christmas and giveaways
  • How to turn holiday campaigns into profit centers
  • Building momentum before, during, and after your event
  • Using blogs, newsletters, and social to multiply your reach
  • How to grow your email list while making an impact

Whether you want more foot traffic, engagement, or revenue, these tactics are built to deliver.

💡 Pro tip: Combine content and incentives to drive participation - then reuse it to tell your story.

🔗 Mentioned Resources


Learn more about Locable and see how your community can become a Locable community.

Join our #TakeBackLocal community of local-doers here >>

Q4 Mindset And Stakes

SPEAKER_00

Welcome to Marketing from the Car. I'm your host, Brian Ostrovsky, founder and CEO of Local Creator of Marketing 345. And as I'm recording this, we're sitting at September 30th, one day away from the fourth quarter, which means holiday season, Christmas season, all of that. For a lot of local businesses and communities, this is a really important time of year. And so the question comes up every year how can I promote my business better? How can I take advantage of the season? How can I help my businesses do this? How can I promote my community? How can I support my members? All those things. And you know, it's

Content As The Core Strategy

SPEAKER_00

funny. I I love gimmicks if it's authentic. And uh, and so you know, lean into this idea. But at the same time, I don't know what your problem is, but the solution's content. So content, you're gonna tell stories. If you are a main street, one of the things we've seen in the past is folks do the 12 days of Christmas, get to know 12 different businesses. I don't care if it's 15 or 50, but you know, use the gimmick of the 12 days of Christmas. And in some cases, they've actually turned this as a profit center. Like, okay, well, uh, if your business wants to be featured, we're gonna do an article about you, we're gonna share it to social, we're gonna share it to email. Maybe we boost that post. It's gonna be $100, $150, whatever. And so you can take some of our worksheets at marketing345.com and go interview stuff. What do you have coming up for the holidays? Do you have any new products? Do you have any events? What should

Monetizing The 12 Days Feature

SPEAKER_00

people know that they don't know about your business? What do you wish people knew? Um, what do people assume that's not true? You know, all of those sorts of things, any new faces to see. And so there's there's a lot of opportunity around content. And if you're a main street or a chamber for that matter, you do this and you're building your brand, you're lifting up your folks. It's just it's pretty simple. Uh, if you're a DMO or tourism-oriented, you can do things to do in the season. Not really a novel idea, but itineraries or mini itineraries or staycations, again, the gimmick of the label. Um, there's just a lot you can do.

Smart Giveaways And List Growth

SPEAKER_00

Now, coming from our media days, we work with uh some 200 magazines and newspapers. Uh, early on, we realized that online you can run giveaways. You can do contests too, but contests require a little bit more legwork. Uh, but giveaways are a lot of fun. People enter for their chance to win. And you probably do some of these things already, but if you do it on your website and people can fill out a form and they can opt into your email, now you're going to grow your email list while people enter for a chance to win. And businesses can uh pay to participate and provide a giveaway. So maybe a $50 gift card, they pay $50 or $100 to participate, and you can give away these different packages for different winners that you do. Now, enter for your chance to win is the easiest. You can also do contests where people have to take pictures or or complete a bingo card or whatever. But just remember, the more you require of someone, the fewer people will enter. So you got to trade those things off. I know um here in my town, Kent Quick, quick Kent, whichever, uh, the uh the gas station is doing a

Pre, During, Post Promotion Loop

SPEAKER_00

thing with uh youth leadership where different communities are shooting these videos for a chance to win scholarship money, right? So that requires more work. They won't have a million people enter despite being a big company nationwide. But you you pick and you choose. Now, don't miss this opportunity. Double down, combine a blog post about a business who's participating with the chance to win something from them. Afterwards, when you pick your winner and they enjoy whatever it is in this basket of goodies that they want, ask them why they entered, ask them about their favorite local business, ask them about something new they experienced because they won that they hadn't, you know, been to before. Ask them what they would say to someone else who hasn't visited the community lately, or maybe if they were from a neighboring community, what they would say to one of their neighbors. And so now you have pre-promotion, the promotion, and post-promotion. And so this gives you a lot of ways to tell your story through different lenses and through different voices.

Extend Momentum Into January

SPEAKER_00

You can also double down and you can do some stuff that might be like things you can win that you could use in January or even tie it into January and February, which is usually a slow time for local businesses. So there might be ways, depending on your community, to get people really excited for the holidays and then continue that on. Um,

Subscriptions And Value Bundles

SPEAKER_00

at the same time, we'll talk more about special things you can do, but I would really encourage businesses, especially who sell products, to think about subscription services, kind of the the box of goodies that you see. Uh, and you know, whether it's flavor of the month or whether it's something else, if you can do maybe holiday specials, as in it's available only in the holiday, at least for now, um, or bundled packages. I don't like you reducing your price. I like you adding more value. Then uh now you're actually driving revenue not just in the holidays, but you know, amortized and realized throughout the year. So there's a lot of opportunity to tell these stories. And um I think too often we try to come up with something too creative when in reality it can be really quite simple.

Cash Mob For Direct Revenue

SPEAKER_00

Another concept that I want to share with you, it's not really holiday specific, uh, but it's called the cash mob. And I think this is a great thing because it can pair well with networking events. And so the idea is you host a networking event at a business, and uh everyone who attends, you have an expectation that they're gonna spend a certain dollar amount, $10, $20, whatever on a product. So now it's not a lot of money out of pocket, but let's say you get 40 people to show up and each one spends 10 bucks. That's 400 bucks in new revenue for the host. And obviously, some will spend a little bit more, and so it's a great opportunity to support a business and help them generate revenue. And maybe you even do something a little bit more um intensive for the holidays, or you do like a cash mob crawl where you go, we're gonna go here, then here, then here. Again, you're gonna have to decide how much you want to plan versus not, but there are just a lot of ways for you to accomplish your goals and for what it's worth afterwards.

Walkable Events And Compounding Content

SPEAKER_00

Please write a blog post, talk about how much money they made from the cash mob, talk about who was there, ask people what they thought: first-time visitors, returning customers, ask the business who hosted what benefit they got out of it, what they thought of it. Maybe you'll get someone who's not a member or not a business owner to go, hey, I should join your organization or I should open a business down there. Look at all these awesome things that are happening in the downtown. And I would say for many of you, you already do tours and you do other sorts of things like that. But the more you can get people walking around thematically uh about you know, highlighting what's unique about your community, the better off you're gonna be. So if you can pair that uh with a gimmick, with a scavenger hunt, uh, with prizes, content talking about who showed up, just keep this whole process going and you'll find that your marketing gives you more content for marketing, which gives you more content. And that is really where you want to be. You don't have to be creative, you don't have to spend a lot of time on

Simple, Consistent Sharing To Take Back Local

SPEAKER_00

this stuff. You surely don't have to be a great writer, but you gotta share with people, you know, on your website and beyond the same sorts of things you might share in a conversation. So as you think about the holidays and you think about really what that can mean to your community, I hope it's a springboard into the new year as well, so that you and your community can take back local.