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Small Business Marketing Tips
Don't Waste The Holidays
November, 2008
If you're just running the same ads all year, you're wasting opportunities. It makes a big difference if you can tie in your ads to current events. You get to be creative, unusual and, most importantly, not boring! After all, the first goal of any ad is to get people to read it.
The easiest current events to use are holidays. We know that greeting card stores and general retail always have special merchandise for major holidays, but what about other kinds of businesses? This is where you get to be creative. Find a way to tie your products or services to a holiday.
It doesn't have to be complicated. In a previous article I mentioned the "world's greatest car salesman" Joe Girard. One of Joe's success secrets was that he kept in touch with his clients every month with a greeting card. His database had birthdays and anniversaries for the clients and he'd send them cards for those occasions, but the rest of the time he used the "holiday of the month" for a theme. If there wasn't a holiday, Joe invented a new one! His humorous, personal cards were a big part of the reason why people stood in line to buy a car from him. They liked him and trusted him. He had built a relationship to earn their business, and he used the holidays very effectively.
We know that the last quarter of the year is a popular time for holiday marketing, with Halloween followed by Thanksgiving followed by the mega-monster of them all, Christmas. Yet even so, many businesses not in retail ignore the opportunity. Let's look at some examples to see what we could do.
An auto shop could build Halloween ads around getting the gremlins out of your engine and heater for winter. Or they could build on the fact that October is National Car Care Month. For Thanksgiving their ads might focus on being thankful your car starts on a cold morning. For New Years the theme might be starting the year fresh with a good tune up. They could run ads for preventative maintenance around Oct 15, National Grouch Day. "Don't let your car make a grouch out of you!" The possibilities are endless and there's an endless supply of holidays and National Something Days to work with.
To make the ads more effective, combine your clever copy with a special offer. I prefer offering an extra service rather than a discount, because offering discounts all the time weakens your pricing. So the auto shop could offer free tire rotation or a wash & vacuum. A photographer could offer a free 8x10 print. Vary the special offer month by month so that it's not the same all the time. You want it to be special, and if you can cleverly tie the offer with the holiday, so much the better.
Your best bet for standing out in the advertising clutter is to use all the unusual or bizarre holidays you can find. January is "Prune Breakfast Month" and "National Soup Month." February is "Creative Romance Month." March 20 is "Rotten Sneaker Day" and March 22 is "National Goof-Off Day." April has "National Laugh Week." May 3 is "International Tuba Day." June 6 is "Doughnut Day." July 20 is "Moon Day" and you can take that any way you want. August 25 is "Kiss and Make Up Day" and the 1st Sunday in September is "National Grandparent's Day." There's a lot more than this small sample, too. So wrap your promotions around a holiday and stand out in the crowd. What are you waiting for? Don't procrastinate - "Procrastination Week" is in March!
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