Let’s Create Your Holiday Season Sales Strategy

Andréa Jones (00:00):
If you like the adrenaline rush of last minute planning, be my guest. But in today's episode, I'm talking all about how to reach your year end revenue goals with some holiday season planning. Let's get into it.

Intro (00:27):
Welcome to The Savvy Social Podcast, the show that blends stories and strategies to help businesses create engaged and profitable online communities using the unique power of social media. And now, your host, Andréa Jones.

Andréa Jones (00:44):
I fricking love the holidays. So I consider the holidays from October 31st all the way through till January 2nd or third, so kind of that last quadrant of the year. And for a lot of businesses that I work with, this is the time to get in those last minute sales. We've got some fun things you can do around Halloween. And then of course, we've got big key dates like Black Friday and New Year new you. So I want to talk about how to prepare for the holidays and even give you some ideas if the holidays aren't a huge selling season for you, there are some ways that you can engage your audience and stay top of mind during the holiday season. And listen, these tips don't necessarily all relate to physical products. So let's say e-commerce based products. If you sell digital products or even services, a lot of us pick up steam this time of year.

(01:44):
So I want to help you get the most out of this buying season. Now, the first thing I want to recommend is that we don't just jump right into selling in the holidays because it does take a little bit of preparation, and I think it's kind of fair to maybe start with this sort of tip, but you got to be doing social all year long in order to really reap the benefits of social media marketing during the holidays. We don't want to be that person who they've never heard of before and then all of a sudden we're in their feed or we're in their inbox and we're asking for their money, and they're like, who this? We want to be trustworthy as a business, as a brand. And I think about the brands who I love seeing in my feed or in my email inbox, one of them being Old Navy.

(02:34):
Y'all know I love Old Navy, man. They get me every time I'm opening their email, I'm going to the website, I'm adding stuff to my car, and they email every day, sometimes twice a day, and I don't get tired of it because I like them as a brand. So I want you to think about that with your content. When you think about what you have to offer to your clients all year long, yes, they know the big sales are coming in the holiday season, but what are you doing all year long to really add value along the way? And we don't necessarily have to take the Old Navy approach of rotating through a million billion sales like O M G every day. There's a new sale that is really hard to sustain as a small business. But what we can do is provide value every day, or at least regularly.

(03:15):
It doesn't have to be every day. It could be weekly, it could be monthly. But think about how you can show up consistently in a way that won't surprise your favorite people when the holidays come and you have a beautiful offer that you want to share with them. And then also, if we think about the social media algorithms, when you're present all year long and people are engaging with your posts, they're more likely to see them when it's time to sell. Okay? So instead of hoping that the algorithm, gods will bless you, Mr. Al will shine his light on you instead of waiting and hoping and praying that that will happen, building up that trust all year long will help you increase the chance that someone will even see your social media post during the holidays when there's lots of posts going on. Okay? All right.

(03:59):
Second tip is to make sure that you are staffed up. The holiday season tends to be very hectic, okay? So not only are we all selling, but then we have to deliver on what we are selling, especially those of us who are service-based business owners. Selling is the tip of the iceberg. We have so much work to do after we close that sale. In fact, that's the majority of what we're doing. So you want to make sure that you have resources to help you with that. So whether that is you're hiring more people, you are getting temporary staff, you're looking at contractors, or maybe even looking at improving your systems or streamlining things so that it's easier to deliver or maybe you're even thinking about working ahead on some things. So I know for me, for instance, in the Savvy Social School, I'm working ahead on our monthly deliverables of new content.

(04:51):
We deliver fresh new content in the school every single month, and I know the holidays are a super busy time, and so I'm working ahead on those deliverables that they're ready to go when this time of the big sale happens. Okay, step three is think about your offers. And I want to think about your offers in a way that you're going to have a holiday sale. Now, I'm going to say the word sale, but sale doesn't always mean a discount. So we're going to talk about other ways that you can offer something special during the holidays, but typically a sale is a discount. So when you're thinking about holiday sale, typically there's some sort of offer that is a discount. So for example, for the Savvy Social School, we do 50% off monthly and yearly memberships during Black Friday, and it's when we get the most members anytime of the year because it is the best time to join.

(05:43):
You are locked in at the 50% off. So it's not like the rest of the year where if you join, sometimes we do 50% off the first month or we do 20% off the first month for Black Friday, it's 50% off. So your best bet is to do the 50% off the year, and a lot of people join at that time. For us, we know that we're working towards at 50% off of our sale, but you don't have to do 50% off or even any discount in order to make your offer appealing during the sales period. Some other things you can think about are adding in special bonuses or free gifts. So this works really well, especially if you have something like a New Year sale or a Halloween sale. So if you're thinking about what you are selling, think about how you can add value to your clients.

(06:36):
So for example, last year for our services, we did an add-on of a funnel audit. So anyone who signed up as a client during our signup period got an additional service that where we audited their funnel. So we looked at their web pages, see what they're converting at. We looked in their email marketing, we looked at all of the connecting pieces into their offer to make sure that all of our efforts on social media will produce the result that they're looking for. Think about your offers and then think about how you can position them to be appealing during the holidays. Last little tip I'll give you actually came from Elizabeth Goddard. Lizzie Goddard. If you go to onlinedrea.com/9 dollar offer, I created $9 offers for the first time this year. And sometimes when we're thinking about a holiday sale, it doesn't necessarily have to be a sale, it could be a micro offer. So my $9 offers all came from products that I already had in the Savvy Social School. And so there's something that we already had we're already doing, but by sectioning it off and giving it its own name and kind of putting it together in a way that was appealing, we sold something that previously we weren't selling before. All right, we're going to take a quick break and when we get back, I'm going to talk about how to talk about those sales during the holiday season.

(08:08):
[Podcast Ad break] Hi, friends, holidays are coming right up, and if you want to get all of the things in order, all of your ducks in a row for the holiday season, I want to give you a free gift. It's our free holiday guide for 2023. Inside you will find 10 tips for a rock solid holiday social media marketing plan. So if you're ready to figure out how to work before you get to the holidays, how to plan ahead, how to give the holidays, the attention it deserves and not lose out on key sales opportunities, this guide is for you. Head on over to onlinedrea.com/holiday to learn more. [Podcast Ad break]

(08:53):
All right, and we're back. As we head into the sales season, one of the exercises that I encourage my members in the Savvy Social School to do is called the before and after exercise. So in this exercise, you're going to take out a piece of paper, and on one side you're going to write before and on the other side you're going to write after. And then you're going to brainstorm the emotions that your audience is experiencing around the time that you're talking about your offer. Okay? So instead of focusing on the benefits, let's say you're an accountant, you can focus on here's how our services work. Here's how frequently we bill people. Here's the tool that we use, right? Instead of focusing on those things, we're going to focus on the feelings. Are you trying to wrap up your year end and you're drowning in everything else?

(09:42):
You have no time. That's a feeling, right? Or another example would be if you are a coach for authors, maybe they're thinking about their 2024 plan on writing books and they're feeling completely overwhelmed by all of the things they want to write, and then they realize they don't have enough time to write them all. So those are all feelings. As a book coach, you could talk about how to choose covers, how to publish on Amazon, you could talk about all of those things, but really the emotion side is where people connect first before we get into all the little tidbits of the benefits. So I want you to pull out a piece of paper and write down those feelings that your audience is having during the holiday season specifically, and how your offer helps them achieve it. So we want to get past the surface level of like this will make you feel good, and we want to hone in on the actual value that people are getting from it.

(10:49):
And a lot of times this falls into three categories. It could be time, it could be money, it could be energy. So time, does it save them time to do what? Does it give them more money to do? What do they have more energy to do what? Think about what they're doing and get specific. So for my members in the Savvy Social School, for instance, I talk a lot about doom scrolling on social media because we tend to do that, right? We all tend to open up Instagram probably because some fake notification came through, like 80% of people like this post, I hate those. And then we're scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, and then we feel so defeated because everyone else's content looks way better than ours. And our post that we posted yesterday got two likes, and it just doesn't feel good. I know how specifically my audience is thinking because I literally crawl into their brains.

(11:41):
I talk to 'em all the time and I tap into those feelings. So yes, I could talk about how to join today, 50% off. I'm going to teach you everything about social media. I mean, immediately you already feel overwhelmed by that. I'm going to get specific and say, listen, you want your posts to stand out in the feed. I know you're doom scrolling while you're pooping. We all do it. So if you want to come join me, I can show you the next best step and I can guide you all year long. So that feeling piece, the specificity of the feeling is really what matters here. Alright, next, we're going to outline all of our holidays. So when we think about the year, the end of the year, like I said, somewhere from October 31st through January 2nd, we want to think about all of the holidays. So we've got the big ones, right?

(12:33):
We've got Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Halloween, and then we've got the new year, we've got Christmas in there. We also want to think about some of the smaller holidays, some of those holidays that may speak directly to your customer and add a note of whimsy or a note of knowing into your posts. So one of my clients, for instance, dog brand, when it's National Dog Day, we post about National Dog Day. People love it. So think about some of those key dates that are important to your audience specifically that you can pepper in to show, Hey, we know what's going on in the world and we're not here just trying to sell stuff. You can always connect it back to your sales using storytelling, but we want to make sure that we're connecting first before selling. So once we have our plan outlined for the holidays, then we want to sit down and think about our launch plan for our sales.

(13:30):
And yes, you're launching something when you are selling during the holidays. These are mini launches. So if you're having a sale for Halloween and then you're having a sale for Black Friday, and then you're having a New Year's Sale, honey, you've got three launches happening in the span of three months. So that's why we're doing so much planning ahead of time so that we can get ahead of it. So we want to outline the holidays, outline the big launch periods, and then you'll start noticing gaps in there in those gaps. We want to fill it in with the rest of our marketing and really speak to client expectations. So really speak to what's happening here now and today, and this is where your before and after will come into handy because by the time you get to that sales post, the post that's like, Hey, we are selling this for 50% off, or, Hey, buy this today, we don't offer this mini offer anytime else.

(14:27):
Or, Hey, we're adding a special bonus for people who buy during this time. Once you get to that point, your people should be ready to pull out their credit cards and pay you. So how do we get them there? The whole time we're talking about their expectations and really focusing on them. This isn't about you, it isn't about your business, really, it's about them. So are there any concerns about your industry that you can answer? Are there any challenges before purchasing your offer? What are the questions people will have as they're thinking about this? What are the considerations and hesitations on spending money on this thing? So for example, if you have a coaching program, let's say it's a coaching intensive before someone joins, they probably want to know what that coaching is like. So perhaps you're going to go live and give a sample of that or produce podcast episodes that talk about what the coaching experience is like.

(15:29):
Maybe you're even going to have some of your clients talk about their experience in the past intensives, right? Okay. So if you sell candles, for instance, like you sell luxury candles, when we think about the candles themselves, what are the ingredients in the candles and why would I care? A lot of people like to be eco-friendly, so we could talk about that if you have eco-friendly candles, I know one of the candles I used to own when I worked at a spa could also be used as a face mask, which was super cool. So maybe you're doing videos about showing the candle, and as it's melting, you take the wax and you rub it on your face. Okay, only do that for face wax candles. Don't do that for every candle. You see what I mean before saying, Hey, our candles are 50% off. We want to show them what it's like before we say this round of the intensive.

(16:21):
We're doing a bonus week of whatever. We want to show them what it's like. And that does take some planning. So in between your posts that talk about the holidays, the posts that talk about the sales, we're all about the customer and the consumer, your client, your potential client in that time. My last tip for the holidays is to get ahead, and this is the biggest thing. If you can do it, it will save you so much headache. Things always happen at the last minute, and the more that you can get ahead, the better. I talked about this 50% off sale that I did in the Savvy Social School, y'all last year when I did it, I accidentally only did 50% off monthly membership. I forgot to market as 50% off for the year. And so I had people literally emailing me saying, why are you only doing a sale per monthly?

(17:15):
I want to pay for the year, but the coupon doesn't work for the year. It had not crossed my mind to even think about yearly as well. So I fixed that, but I was only able to fix it because I had worked ahead with my team. We wrote all the copy. We already had the sales pages done. So going in and adding a coupon code and adjusting some of the copy was easy to do. If I hadn't done that, I would have a mountain of work ahead of me and it would feel completely overwhelming. So what we do in our agency, and if you want to be an agency client, absolutely do this for all of our clients as well, is we create a launch plan. And in that launch plan, we outline everything. We link to the sales pages, we link to the email copy, we link to the social posts, we talk about the themes.

(18:03):
What are we talking about when we outline the expectations? Here are our goals. Here's when we're running Facebook ads, here's when these emails are going out. And then that way we have a central document, central location where we can go to for that campaign. So it's like a campaign brief, and this really helps so that we can duplicate it for future years. When I think about something like our annual LinkedIn challenge, we're heading into our fourth or fifth year this year. Those campaign briefs make it easy to duplicate the challenge again and again.

(18:36):
So as you're planning for this year, you're actually planning for next year too and the year after that. So make it easier on yourself, work hard once, put it all together, and then when the holidays come, you can focus on answering those customer service issues. You can focus on networking with your audience members. You can focus on being present with your family instead of stressing out about throwing up a social media post on Thanksgiving because you have a Black Friday post going out the next day. Okay? All right, friends, those are my tips for the holidays. I hope you have a wonderful holiday season and I'll be back soon with another podcast episode. That's all for today. Bye for now.