The holidays come with more opportunities for sales than any other time of year. The job of local marketers is to help your clients tap into the seasonal traffic. However, it is impossible for you to design personalized marketing campaigns for everyone, especially if you have hundreds of clients. To ensure all your clients benefit, you need to come up with scalable ideas, rather than looking at marketing on an individual level.
1. Reiterate the Importance of their Google My Business Account
With an account on Google My Business, when customers search for a company, they immediately see a wealth of information, like opening hours, phone number, and address, as well as a location on the map, reviews, and photos. This also impacts local SEO, allowing clients to rise to a higher position in the search results.
Stress that to get the most out of Google My Business, your clients need to claim their listings. Only then can they ensure that all the details for their businesses are correct, make updates when anything changes, and choose the most appropriate (and specific) categories. They will also have the chance to select photos that will most appeal to prospects.
Emphasize that a Google My Business account is essential for local stores. Draw your clients’ attention to the fact that 38 percent of consumers plan to shop in independent stores this year and that 86 percent research online before deciding what to buy.
2. Provide Stats
Sharing data not only shows clients how well their campaigns are performing — it also provides insights into where they should focus their efforts. However, creating charts for every client manually, even if you use the same structure each time, is a huge drain on your resources.
A better way to provide clients with the information is to use reporting tools. This has the added benefit that you can set the KPIs that matter for each client. Once you’ve set up reporting, you can keep delivering the data with barely more effort on your part. Your clients can then act on the information and tweak their marketing strategies on their own.
3. Offer General Guidance
Many pieces of holiday marketing advice apply to every business. Explain to your clients how they can encourage more customers to buy from them with a good return policy. Talk about how they can improve visibility online with local SEO combined with seasonal search terms. Show them how they can make a positive impression by taking an active role in their communities for the holidays, such as by making a charitable donation to a local organization.
4. Group Businesses Together
You can also provide more specialized advice simply by dividing your clients into groups. These groups can be based around industry, size, whether the business is online or a physical store, or another factor.
For instance, startups with no marketing teams may be unaware of some of the basics. You may like to send them advice on setting up holiday newsletters or explain how blog articles with a seasonal twist receive far more views and are great for SEO.
For businesses with brick-and-mortar stores, talk about how to bring in more customers to increase sales. Ideas to discuss include hosting or attending local events, offering treats like hot chocolate or cookies, decorating the store, and extending shopping hours.
5. Steer Clients Away from Bad Ideas
A final thing to do is warn clients about potentially devastating marketing campaigns. Tactics that fall into this category include:
- Attacking the competition. This tacky technique shows a lack of holiday spirit and could offend prospects, even driving them to the competitors.
- Bad humor. If clients are unsure about the taste of a joke, tell them it is better to cut it from their campaign.
- Ambitious promises. Customers want to know that their gifts will arrive on time and in the condition they expect. Make sure that if your clients are offering faster shipping than normal, they can keep their word. Similarly, warn about listing the correct number of products in stock.
If you have many clients, all needing help with their holiday marketing, it may seem as if you have an impossible task ahead of you. The trick is to look for ways to make your efforts scalable. The amount you are able to do will depend on your time commitments and the number of clients you have, but even the busiest agency should be able to handle all the above ideas.