Thanksgiving and Black Friday are inching closer every single hour, which means that people in the business world need to be gearing up for a huge frenzy. More than likely, retailers will do more business on those days than they would in several months. Add Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday to the mix, and you can be sure that you’ll be making plenty of sales.
Few retailers would ever say that’s a bad thing, but it can be if you’re not prepared for it. You also could potentially lose out on customers if you don’t do enough to get noticed above all the noise your competitors will be making. As a result, you’ll want to first focus on your marketing efforts.
Gearing Up Your Marketing Machines
Digital marketing has become a massive industry, but that doesn’t mean that many people have really mastered the art of applying it to their own small business. Make sure that you’re doing more than just buying a few banner ads and posting a couple of articles on social media.
Go all out on every free platform you have in front of you. The biggest benefit of social media marketing is the fact that it costs so little to influence such a large number of people. If you do everything yourself, then it’s essentially a free way to market.
However, you don’t want to be reduced to posting content that potential clients will think of as spam. Think up clever ways to integrate your company’s marketing message into material that people will actually be excited to follow.
In fact, putting together the right campaign now can ensure that you can continue to maximize sales after November. Many small business owners focus exclusively on Black Friday or Cyber Monday deals. While they do good business during this time of the year, they might be missing out on clients who would have continued to buy from them once all of the festivities were over.
As soon as you start to truly communicate with your client base, you’ll be able to attract repeat buyers.
Sell Products or Services that Have a Place in the Market
Quite a few upstart technology companies entered the market with high hopes and quickly learned that nobody wanted the particular type of products that they were selling. As a result, they went out of business.
Learn from this example so you don’t end up like them. Make sure that you’re selling something that’s popular enough to attract attention. On the other hand, you don’t want to sell something that all of your competitors also have on the market.
A quick search on Amazon or eBay should help to illustrate whether or not you’re faced with stiff competition.
Check Your On-hand Inventory Before the Rush
As you continue to grow your social media presence, you should be able to attract an additional number of shoppers to your page. Over time, this can cause inventory problems.
Don’t feel like you can wait to sort these out. Check to make sure you have enough products on hand before orders start pouring in. If you don’t have a program to manage your inventory, then now would be a good time to invest in one. Cost-conscious business owners may want to look into an open-source solution.
Keep your eyes peeled for any unusual market activity. Component shortages can transition into full-fledged product shortages fairly easily.
Unless you fulfill orders through a drop-shipping arrangement, you’ll want to buy some extra merchandise now.
Don’t Get Carried Away
On the other hand, there is such a thing as being too prepared. Small business owners sometimes overreact and invest in more products than they can ever hope to sell. They then have to liquidate this supply later on, which might end up running them a loss.
A good way of gauging market interest is to look into what kind of products are being promoted by influencers on Instagram and other major social outlets.
Once you get a better grip on the direction that the market is moving in, you’ll know what kind of services to provide. That can put you into better shape to handle the post-holiday sales slump as well.
