2019 so far has been a worrisome year with many small businesses feeling the effects of a tough trading period.
With Brexit fast approaching and financial uncertainty in the air, consumers are spending cautiously. Yet small businesses are rejoicing as the distant jingle bells signal a traditionally lucrative trading period – Christmas.
However, the approaching holiday of giving (and spending) gives way to January – historically a poor month for most sectors. Most traders accept this as a poor month and resign to grin and bear it, but is there a way to beat it?
- Spend your marketing pounds during the
festival season – when the cash till is ringing, businesses tend to lower or pause their marketing spend. Big mistake. Invest some of that extra cash you’re making into your marketing budget. Around 3% of your customers are ready to buy now, so much of your marketing should be going towards brand awareness and woo-ing your market – charming them all the way into your bank account (which can take weeks or even months). In particular – traffic adverts promoting content (like a blog post) to a broad audience will drive thousands of people to your website for pennies a click. - Track your website users – all those extra customers for you will mean more website traffic – make sure you’re capturing user data in the form of a Facebook Pixel – else your users are here today and gone tomorrow. Without a pixel, if they don’t buy / sign up / book in then and there you’ll never be able to sell them again – a big waste of an opportunity.
- Sign up website users to your
newsletter – as above, you want to remarket to your website users when they are rolling in, and a newsletter is the perfect tool. Make sure you have a whopping big ‘sign up’ button and a pop up – get those subscriber numbers up! - Prepare newsletter campaign – in January you’ll want to send out fortnightly newsletters to your loyal subscriber list (you should be doing this anyway) – 50% content (a recipe, tips, advice) and an appealing offer for January only. Avoid telling people it’s Tracy on reception’s birthday or what your opening hours – no one cares and it doesn’t inspire a buying frenzy.
- Prepare a remarketing campaign on your
website users – use social media remarketing adverts – (using your Facebook Pixel’s help) you can send ads to users who have been on your website (they know you and they are ready to buy). Give them an offer and for tracking purposes create a code, a link or use lead adverts so you know how successful it’s been.
