When planning their marketing strategy for the year ahead, small business owners will often check the calendar for holidays and special occasions. Easter, Valentine’s, Halloween, Christmas and Mother’s Day, are all likely to be noted. When targeted by well timed and effective promotional campaigns, these days can generate a significant boost in revenue.
But many small firms are looking beyond these key dates to promote their brand, win new customers, and drive sales at other times of the year.
Thinking outside the box
Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are important to gift retailer Watches2U, but it has also used social media to engage with more obscure initiatives.
“We recently blogged about the International Day of Happiness,” says sales and marketing director Faisal Bhatti. “These days tend to trend on social media, even if only for a short time, so it is important to be involved. We try to appeal to the widest scope of people possible with every campaign.”
As an online retailer, Watches2U faces challenges. Unlike, a physical store that has its own defined promotional space and a set number of local competitors, the online marketing space is open to everyone. Bhatti says: “This makes it even more crucial to ensure that your marketing strategies are not only aligned with your target audience, but to also take into account the market conditions and identify the right time and space in the market to run effective promotions.”
In addition to running campaigns for Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, taxi company minicabit organises promotional campaigns around events, such as an Adele concert at London’s O2 Arena. Data from the business’s advanced booking facility is used to identify trends in customer behaviour and tailor marketing strategies accordingly.
CEO Amer Hasan said: “Sustained success from event-driven marketing requires a level of agility. You have to continually survey the market and be prepared to pivot. Timing is key. Using Google Trends and analysing customer data is a great way to flag those events most worth pursuing.”
With the growing popularity of cosmetic dental treatments, dental practices are aligning their business marketing activity with Christmas and New Year.
Dentist David Hickey, who owns Southport Road Dental practice in Lancashire, says: “Around New Year, for example, our marketing promotion would be based around New Year resolutions and ‘dental detox’ work, which tends to appeal to older patients who’ve not been to see a dentist for a long time.”
The campaigns are run across multiple channels, including email, newsletters and Facebook, and generate good feedback. Some events, however, have proved more elusive for the marketing team. The practice has tried, unsuccessfully, to target the lucrative wedding season, for example. “We’ve attended wedding fairs and given brides-to-be some ideas about treatments such as teeth whitening, but they usually want to pursue it with their own dentist,” says Hickey.
Customer interaction
Some companies have involved their customers in their event-based marketing efforts. Inflatable stand up paddleboard firm Red Paddle Co uses stunning video and images to grab the attention of the public and the media. Much of it is generated by their consumers and is unexpected. The company has to be quick to react.
Digital media manager Luke Green says: “We have certain images that we use for different events, but most of our social media channels feature user-generated content. We can almost guarantee that something will be sent to us that we can leverage, whether it’s a paddle boarding Santa at Christmas or images that evoke long summer days. This can sometimes make it difficult to plan ahead, but we know we are lucky to have customers who are so amazing at sharing their world by harnessing trending themes, hash tags and celebrations themselves.”
For businesses like alcohol delivery app Bevy, every day of the year can be a special occasion because of the nature of the product. But as co-founder and CEO Kevin Kovar points out, while being relevant all the time makes the sell easier, being heard can be difficult, especially on major dates.
He says: “When you do a lot of your marketing online and rely heavily on email, it can be a struggle to get Mother’s Day and New Year’s day promotions to stand out from the hordes of others packing out people’s inboxes. So, while pushing promos for the usual dates does do a little something for our top line, we’re becoming increasingly inclined to create our own dates and encourage people to celebrate atypical events.”
And depending on people’s tastes, there can be a lot of these occasions in a given year. Bevy takes a holistic approach to providing alcohol, being seen as more than just a delivery solution, but as a brand that understands the atmosphere surrounding people’s lives life whilst having a drink.
Kovar says: “This includes planning promotions, stunts, giveaways, producing music playlists, and even changing our product selection based on these events. For example, we made sure all our stores carried Guinness and Jameson on St. Patrick’s Day and that the products were placed first in the app.”
As many small businesses are now recognising, identifying the occasions that really matter to their customers can go a long way in building engagement and boosting revenues, much more so than jumping on the same calendar bandwagon as the rest of the competition.
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