Should You Start Holiday Marketing Now? Walmart is.
There’s always a lot we can learn from big brands. Walmart, in a death fight with Amazon and other retailers is launching its Christmas and holiday marketing “now”. It’s not waiting until November.
What about you? Should you start marketing to your customers NOW about their holiday shopping plans?
The Wall Street Journal writes about it here.
Here’s a few tips to market for the holidays:
- Educate your customers and send them emails that they’ll really want to open.
- Be frequent, but not too annoying. I get what seems like 500 catalogs from all sorts of cookie and etc vendors who want me to buy their things for my customers as gifts. They send mailing after mailing. Why? They know repetition matters.
- Segment your customer list to give the right message to the right customer. What customers is a repeat shopper and you might want to say thanks with special offer.
- If your website (and retail store) don’t look good – spruce them up.
- Make it easy for people to shop with you.
- What advertising budget should you consider to reach a wider audience? Organic marketing alone, probably won’t be enough.
What I like about what Walmart is doing is that they’re not doing things like everyone else is doing. But they’re leading the market, and getting some added press, at the same time.
As a small business owner you cannot afford to market and be like everyone else. YOU must differentiate yourself.
Whatever you do, don’t be the cheapest on the market, which Seth Godin recently reminded us about.