actionable marketing guide

Dear ,

Happy Cyber Monday!

Created by online marketers to compete with bricks and mortar retailers’ Black Friday promotions, Cyber Monday is a promotional sales day that takes place the Monday after American Thanksgiving.

Black Friday is the official start of holiday shopping in the US. It takes place the Friday after Thanksgiving although many retailers start pushing their holiday goods as early as the beginning of November.

Black Friday gets its name from the fact that many consumer-oriented retailers go into the black financially with this first holiday promotion push. Until that point, these businesses are able to pay their bills but don’t make any profit. 

Here’s how shoppers planned their holiday purchases according to the NFR:

Over the years, I’ve watched retailers try a variety of promotional strategies to get their share of the holiday shopping spend. For some consumers, it’s a patient wait for hours in the cold pre-dawn hours to get limited special deals.

One of my friends complained that she was unable to see her friends in her Instagram stream since it was chock full of retailers. Astute marketers target you where you focus your attention. 

American Express created Small Business Saturday to help local businesses to get shoppers into smaller shops. In the beginning Amex encouraged shopping by offering discounts on your credit card, a practice they’ve since stopped.

Now small businesses must create and fund their own specials to attract shoppers.

Key actionable marketing point:

• Promotions have a real business cost whether they’re paid advertising or pricing discounts. Additionally, consider whether you’ve increased your net revenues or only changed its timing.

While holiday shopping is traditional consumer-focused due to its gift giving intent, in recent years B2B marketers have joined the sales frenzy to increase Q4 sales.  My inbox has been a non-stop stream of emails from both B2C and B2B companies.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday have become full-fledged small business B2B promotional events.

Having worked with a Fortune 100 company to create a targeted small business offering, I know they’re difficult to target since small businesses often act a lot like consumers.

Actionable Marketing Advice:

• While it doesn’t make sense to offer pricing deals during your busiest buying season, you must stay competitive with your peers, namely retailers selling products that fulfill the same needs as your offering. You don’t want your customers to purchase from them since they may never come back to you.

Defensively offer a special deal or promotion to continue to encourage existing customer purchases and to attract new customers during the holidays.

• Support future sales by offering a discount for January buying.

• Offer a low priced initial incentive to get buyers using your product.

When possible, incorporate incentives to drive sales during January when retailers have a more challenging time getting people to purchase especially while they’re still paying off their holiday bills. For example, give them a discount with purchase that has to be used in January. Of course exclude non-full price items.

If you’re considering expanding your social media use in 2018, I hope you’ll consider joining me at Social Media Marketing World. It’s one of the biggest conferences focused on social media.

Happy Marketing
Heidi.

Heidi Cohen
Actionable Marketing Guide

• Heidi Cohen was featured on this list of actionable content marketing tips (my favorite kind!).
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