Cyber Monday falls on December 2nd this year and online shoppers are already working on their shopping list. How about you, small business owner? Are you ready for the busiest sales day of the year? You better be or you’ll be missing out on sales. Here’s a checklist to help you get your ducks in a row:
The holiday season means a spike in sales for most businesses. At the same time, though, honesty is never a more powerful marketing tactic. Customers often value a comfortable experience, with a brand they can trust, more than they do product features – especially when they’re already rushed during a busy shopping season.
I love this time of the year! Fall is an exciting time – the trees are putting on a majestic show for us, Halloween is right around the corner, followed by Thanksgiving, and the Holidays! That’s a lot of excitement packed in just a few weeks. For marketers and small business owners, this excitement is ten-fold – we’re only a few weeks away from Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and planning can make a huge difference on our year-end bottom line.
I get really disappointed when I hear a professional (especially someone with a marketing function) tell me that they don’t understand or care for search, social media, and mobile marketing. Let’s face it, whether you like it or not, search, social, and mobile marketing are here to stay and can’t be ignored for a simple reason – that’s how Millennials roll!
With more and more customers turning to online resources for holiday shopping, social media should be an integral part of your holiday strategy. If you’re currently utilizing a handful of social media channels, or just Facebook, it’s best to come up with a plan to make sure you are reaching your audience and sharing the right message. We’ve put together a few pointers that will help your social media strategy go smoothly and, hopefully, profitably this holiday season.
For a lot of business-to-consumer companies, the holiday season is the time of year they rely on to get them through some of the slower months. With the first day of autumn already behind us, now is the perfect time to prepare your employees for your upcoming busy season. Here are three ways your employees should be helping you increase sales this fall:
Years ago (not to date myself), marketers could use the same content over and over for a year or two. A set of great case studies would serve a sales team for a few years – in fact, during my MBA program, we learned from case studies that were five years old and still relevant to the topics being covered in class.
Sometimes the most difficult part about your brand’s marketing efforts is measuring their effectiveness. Most online channels, though, provide marketers with data on the reach of the message and the demographics of the audience who received it. If you’re using YouTube to promote your brand, here are a few analytics features that can help you determine the effectiveness of your videos:
While YouTube is not often the most talked about marketing tactic for a brand, it can greatly complement your marketing efforts by giving your audience an additional channel to absorb your information. In fact, video marketing may become an even greater channel for your brand as online video users are expected to double to 1.5 billion in 2016, according to The Hayzlett Group. Statistics show that over 1 billion users spend more than 4 billion hours watching YouTube videos each month, which means that maybe now is the time to enhance your brand’s YouTube presentation. Here are a few ideas to get your video marketing rolling on YouTube.
