Anatomy of a Good Promotion – Part 1: Planning
The anatomy of a good promotional offer: Good planning begins early.
With the fourth quarter now underway, it's high time to develop your holiday sales and promotional strategies. Don't stress. We've put together three posts reviewing best practices and recommendations for developing winning promotions. Today's post is about planning out your holiday promotions.
Start planning your offers early
The most important element is to develop your sales and marketing plans carefully. Like any project, the devil’s in the details. Advanced planning can make the difference between successful holiday campaigns and ones that disappoint. Well ahead of time, make sure you:
- Do your homework: Review your sales from last year. What were the big sellers? Don’t know? Make it a priority to install tracking code and capture those metrics this year.
- Beef up inventory: You know better than anyone else about lead times, especially for items coming from overseas. Talk to your suppliers ahead of time and try to negotiate discounts for early purchases. Make sure to record the new inventory in your accounting system, and build alerts in case it runs short before your holiday promotion begins, so you can quickly re-order. The worst thing that can happen is to build a successful holiday campaign, bring in a lot of customers, and then run out of the things they want to buy.
- Empower your sales team: If you have a sales or support team, make sure you also plan for staffing needs well in advance. Take the time to make sure they’re knowledgeable about the holiday and how it ties into your business and your campaign. Then, make sure they’re ready to go when your holiday campaign starts.
- Optimize for search (SEO): Update your keywords for better search engine optimization, adding product or category keywords that directly address the items in any promotions you're planning.
- Create “quick navigation” paths: Even before you launch an offer, consider modifying your website to add navigational “quick links” on your home page, linking shoppers directly to the items you're promoting in your offer.
Pro Tip: “When you think SEO, don’t just think Google or keywords. Those are absolutely important, but consumers aren’t just Googling products anymore,” says Tracey Wallace, Editor-in-Chief of the BigCommerce Blog. “Forty-four percent of product searches begin on online marketplaces. Are your products there? Also, when thinking about ‘optimizing for search,’ think about how you can optimize your products for discoverability –– not just your website. Make sure you utilize Google Shopping, Facebook Shop, Pinterest Buyable Pins, Amazon, and eBay. In fact, eBay can be a great channel to beef up your offers or even offload older inventory without taking too heavy a hit on margins.”
Get started!
As a reminder, here are the dates of the upcoming holidays:
- Diwali (October 30)
- Halloween (October 31)
- Thanksgiving Day (November 27)
- Black Friday (November 28)
- Cyber Monday (December 1)
- #CyberTuesday (December 2)
- Hannukah (December 24 – January 1)
- Christmas (December 25)
- Kwanzaa (December 26 – January 1)
- New Year's Even (December 31)
Chase Jones, Small Business Marketing, PayPal