Small Business Tips To Survive The Holiday Season
For small businesses, the holiday season represents a lucrative opportunity to boost yearly earnings. With a good strategy, a small business can hold its own against larger competitors and enjoy the holiday period. Here are seven tips that small businesses can use to survive the ultra-competitive holiday season.
- Have a Plan
This is the most important tip for any small business that wants to enjoy the holiday season. The holiday season is too important in the business calendar for a small business to simply ‘wing it’. Having a plan includes understanding your business, its capacities, your clients, and their holiday shopping patterns. This information is useful in order to set accurate projections about your holiday season inventory and workforce.
- Embrace the holiday spirit
The main appeal that small businesses have over larger corporations is the personal touch that they can offer consumers. Embracing the holiday spirit by adding holiday decorations and being cheerful works wonders towards fostering your clients’ spending enthusiasm. You can adopt holiday-themed uniforms for you and your staff and maintain a friendlier demeanor during the season to further connect with your clients.
- Get your website holiday-ready
Most small business use a modest bandwidth for their website as they do not expect a lot of traffic. However, if you properly implement SEO in holiday season, then you should ensure that you increase your bandwidth in anticipation for the increased web traffic. You should also change your website theme to holiday-friendly colors and prominently feature fast moving holiday products on your website for increased visibility.
- Intelligently manage your cash flow
If leveraged correctly, you should expect your sales volume to exponentially increase during the holiday season. However, this also means that you need to have adequate cash reserves to prepare yourself for the start of the holiday season. During the rest of the year, you need to manage your cash flow to ensure that you have the resources to acquire the increased inventory levels and staff members for the holiday season boom.
- Up your social media game
Small businesses need to recognize that they are not the only ones taking advantage of the holiday season. Large corporations have the resources to mount far-reaching marketing campaigns during the holiday season. To ensure that your voice is heard, you need to significantly work on your social media management. If you get help with SEO in holiday season, then you will know which key words to use in your social media marketing endeavors. You should also consider having a full time social media manager during the holiday season to engage with your clients and answer any queries/complaints that they may have.
- Schedule family time
Most small business owners understandably want to focus most of their efforts on their businesses during this lucrative period. However, for your own psychological well-being, you should also maintain a healthy work-life balance and spend some time with your family during the festive season.
- Have holiday sales and promotions
Nothing attracts customers faster than a discount. Your holiday season marketing strategy should include a number of attractive promotions to incentivize your customers to do business with you. To increase the visibility of your promotions, hire a SEO in holiday season specialist to get your message out.
