For most traditional retail stores, holiday marketing is easy. Lots of retail products make great gifts. But what if what you offer doesn’t fit the traditional gift-giving mold? Can holiday marketing still work for service based businesses or B2B companies? Let’s look at 3 themes for putting holiday marketing to work.
The Perfect Gift
To make your marketing really effective you’ve got to get into the conversation that is already going on in your prospect’s head. During the holiday season, many of the conversations that are going on inside the head of your prospects are fairly predictable. They’re looking for great gift ideas for the people on their list, special holiday deals, and planning holiday get togethers with friends and family.
The Perfect Gift
The quest for the perfect gift is one of the dominant themes during the holiday season. Gifts don’t just have to be limited to what is in stock at the local shopping mall. With some creative copywriting and advertising, services can be positioned as the perfect gift. Gift certificates for yoga classes, house cleaning, massage, or even an introductory airplane flight could be a brilliant gift. Incidentally, after receiving a gift certificate for an introductory airplane flight, I went on to earn my pilot’s license. Gift certificates provide a way of making an intangible service tangible for the purpose of wrapping it up and giving it as a gift.
Save Time
During the holidays, time is at an even greater premium than it is the rest of the year due to all the extra holiday activity and preparations. This provides a great marketing opportunity for products or services that save time or reduce stress. For example, residential cleaning, handyman, and carpet cleaning businesses could all position themselves during the holiday season as the ideal solution to getting your home ready for the holidays.
Be Prepared
With all that takes place at this time of year, and with a new year just around the corner, there is a big opportunity for businesses that can help you be prepared. For example, holiday travel provides a great marketing opportunity for businesses such as pet sitters who help make travel worry free by taking care of your pets while you’re away. The need to look your best at holiday parties provides hair, nail, beauty salons, and others with a great holiday angle for their marketing. Lawyers, accountants, business consultants, and others can craft their holiday marketing around being ready for the year ahead.
The holiday season represents a tremendous marketing opportunity for most businesses. For some businesses, holiday marketing is really straight forward while for others it takes some creativity. How can you put the holiday angle in your marketing this season?
