Holiday season marketing - NOW is the time to start planning as a small business owner.
This week on the S.O.B. (Small Owned Business) Marketing podcast, Vivian and I are discussing the importance of early planning for holiday marketing. We list out key dates such as Black Friday (and even Thanksgiving!), the need to strategize marketing efforts well in advance, and we discuss some specific tips you can use in your holiday season marketing.
Vivian did the work for you and created a free Holiday Season Marketing Checklist! Download it here: https://theseasonedmarketer.com/holiday
We started a new segment at the beginning of our episodes: S.O.B. Marketing Hot Take! This episode we want to know if you’re Team Capitalism (and think it’s normal for people to shop on Thanksgiving day) or Team thanksgiving (and think people should wait until Black Friday). Let us know in the comments which team you are and why!
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Chapters:
00:00 Welcome to our Marketing Cult! Please Leave Us a Review
01:25 S.O.B. Marketing Hot Take: Thanksgiving vs. Capitalism
06:54 The Importance of Early Planning in Marketing
11:12 Holiday Marketing Checklist FREE DOWNLOAD
12:13 Utilizing Data and Customer Insights in Marketing
20:09 Product Strategies for the Holiday Season
30:07 Engaging Existing Customers in Holiday Marketing Strategy
34:06 TLDL; Planning for Holiday Season Marketing
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𝐑𝐄𝐋𝐀𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐓:
Holiday Marketing Checklist: https://theseasonedmarketer.com/holiday
The Power of Repetition in Small Business Marketing: https://youtu.be/k01cKs5CkTE
Podcast Episodes with The Design Demon:
Marketing to Existing Customers: https://youtu.be/yO1fSk1xEKk
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Episode Transcripts: https://sobmarketing.com/blog
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Vivian: Listen, we know that as a small business owner you are working hard on the daily to keep your business fully operational while trying to promote it. And while some days it may feel like the business is owning you, if we're being honest with each other I bet you would admit that you wouldn't give up the insanity for anything.
Chelsea: Our commitment here at the S.O.B. Marketing podcast is to give you the real talk, what works when it comes to advertising, marketing, and promoting your business. And then what doesn't really work.
Vivian: And Chelsea and I promise to always keep the conversation real.
*Beginning of Episode*
Chelsea: It's the most wonderful time of the year.
Vivian: Is it though? Is it?
Chelsea: It depends on who you're asking. Hey guys, welcome back to the S.O.B. Marketing Podcast. S.O.B. as in Small Owned Business. We would never call you guys names. This week we are talking about holiday season marketing and why it is not too early to be talking about holiday season marketing.
Vivian: We get it, before you guys start rolling your eyes because it is September, you gotta start planning for it now.
Chelsea: Yes, you gotta start planning for it now. But Vivian, before we get into this week's topic, y'all, we have a new segment.
It's called the S.O.B. Marketing Hot Take. Vivian, can you believe this shit?
Vivian: Well, tell me what ridiculousness are you bringing to the table today, Chelsea?
Chelsea: So today and what we're going to be doing in all of our future episodes is we're going to start the conversation with a hot take, with something a little controversial that we want to discuss with y'all, our listeners.
Vivian: So we want you guys to be mulling this over as we're moving through the discussion and also because we care about your opinions, believe it or not, this is probably the only place on earth where we actually care about your opinions.
Chelsea: We actually want to hear those.
Vivian: We want you guys to comment in the discussion anywhere. Just let us know what side of the team you're on.
Chelsea: Yeah, we're going to be doing teams. Okay, so for this week's SOB Marketing Hot Take, I want to talk about Vivian, this graph that I saw the other day. It was, when people are spending the most money during the peak holiday season. So number one makes sense. It was Black Friday, 75%.
Vivian: Remember Black Friday is the day after, the Friday right after Thanksgiving that always falls on a Thursday.
Chelsea: Yes. I want to know. Please let me know if you didn't know when Black Friday was. Vivian. The second most shopped day with 71% of people shopping on this day was Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving. Okay, you know what was third? Cyber Monday with 37%. So it went from 75%, 71% to 37%.
Vivian: So basically what you're saying is right after we say "Dear sweet baby Jesus, thank you for this wonderful meal and for our family and friends and for everything that you have given us". Capitalism is on the buffet. Is that what you're saying?
Chelsea: Yeah. Apparently we're going straight to capitalism. So I guess we're asking this week, are you team capitalism?
Vivian: Or team Thanksgiving? Like, can we please get through our Thanksgiving meal before we start shopping and spending money and doing all that?
Chelsea: Absolutely. You know what, Vivian? What team are you? I think I know. But go ahead.
Vivian: Personally, I'm on team Thanksgiving. I do not do any shopping on the actual Thanksgiving Day. But then again, Chelsea also knows I'm a last minute shopper and legit buy all my gifts the last two weeks before Christmas.
Chelsea: Last two weeks, I have witnessed this woman buying Christmas presents, I don't want to say on Christmas Eve, but I mean the day before Christmas Eve.
Vivian: Which are you?
Chelsea: I'm team Thanksgiving, but I'm also team like, if you're looking for a bargain, I get it. I personally, and this could be because of who we are and we're all about small businesses, but I personally try to shop only small businesses during the holiday season. To be honest, usually they don't have anything going on, on Thanksgiving. So why would I go shopping on Thanksgiving? You know?
Vivian: Yeah. Interesting discussion point, because I will say it's almost like we all...Chelsea and I grew up obviously with the same mother. Hey, Reina. Love you. We did a lot of Black Friday shopping. When I was young, we, mom and I, it was our thing. We used to get up like super early in the morning.
Chelsea: I wasn't born yet.
Vivian: Yeah, Chelsea wasn't even born yet. Five o'clock in the morning to go out to start the line to be able to get into the stores and get access to those deals. I feel like maybe what this graph is showing us is that basically that line or that time frame when people are starting to get in line for those deals is going further and further into the previous day into Thanksgiving now. So basically it's like, let's eat the meal, then let's go out. Let's go shopping, let's shop online, let's do all that stuff. So it's just been bumped up progressively year after year.
Chelsea: Yes. So y'all please in the comments, let us know: are you team capitalism or team Thanksgiving?
Vivian: All right. Friendly reminder before we get into the meat and potatoes of the discussion today, we do have something that's unique to our podcast, a TLDL section.
That is a chapter at the very end where Chelsea will go through. It stands for too long, didn't listen. If you're in a hurry, we encourage you skip to that TLDL section. Chelsea will give you a brief overview and then come back and listen to the entire episode and conversation simply because that's where you're going to get the most useful information.
Also because we love a good competition, I'm just going to remind you guys that people on Apple podcast are kicking your butt, Spotify. Okay, if you're listening to us on Spotify, you need to go ahead and subscribe because at this point it is overwhelming the percentage of people that are subscribed to our podcast on Apple and not on Spotify. So we want you guys to be competitive. We know you have that type A personality. Do it. Do it. Do it right now.
Chelsea: Absolutely. Okay, Vivian, I want to start this conversation with a statistic. According to the American Express survey, 65% of small businesses report that holiday shopping directly impacts their overall financial health. I bring this up because like Vivian said earlier, it is not too early to start planning your holiday season and start planning your marketing. Why would you not want to start early when it has that much of an impact on your overall health as a small business?
Vivian: Can I give you a little mindset shift that I've had, I'd say in the last 10 years. I think I just always have a lot going on. Right?
Chelsea: Yes. Yes she does.
Vivian: The thing is, what I realized is it's helpful for me in my mind to, the approach I use is: I have this like ongoing to do list of things that I know need to get done in the next six weeks. What I tell myself is anything that I can do during my downtime or just whenever I'm accessible to do it is going to put me one step ahead or allow me to mark some of those things off of the list, which creates less stress down the road. So I would just recommend that maybe you guys take that same approach like Chelsea is saying, because it has such an important impact on your financials. If you get 30% of your revenue during the holiday season, right? Or maybe that's what you're hoping to do. You're like, hey, I know there's plenty of opportunity. I just haven't really hit it home the last couple of years. It may be because of your lack of planning upfront.
Now we're going to be at the end of September when you guys are listening to this. You have all of October, all of November and all of December, right? To really hit home and drive up those sales for your business. So the more that you could get done in the next two weeks, three weeks, you're setting yourself up for success because you're going to be less stressed and you're going to be able to capture those opportunities because what likely may happen is if you don't plan ahead, you're going to get to Black Friday, Christmas time, and you're going to be like, man, I really wish I would have just organized everything a little better, right?
Chelsea: Absolutely. I also want to say this conversation is not to force you guys to participate in Black Friday.
Vivian: Yeah, if you don't want to do any of that.
Chelsea: You don't have to do any of that, but you do want to make sales during the holiday season. So just organizing and framing and setting up everything so that you can make the most of it. That's what we're saying. We're not saying, figure out what deals you're going to give. If you don't want to do any deals, you don't have to. But you do need to know how you're going to make those touch points happen with potential buyers or consumers.
Okay, so Vivian, I want to name some key dates during the holiday season. We got Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday. I didn't include Thanksgiving.
Vivian: You forgot Thanksgiving, the one that's apparently number two.
Chelsea: I know, but okay. Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday. I bring this up because I want you guys to plan out what you're doing for each of those days. Ask yourself, am I even participating in this day? Again, you don't have to do Black Friday, it's all up to you. You don't want to give on Giving Tuesday, that's up to you. That's the first place where you want to start. Am I even going to participate? If you decide you're going to participate, what promotions or specials will you be doing? If any.
Maybe there are specific products that you want to sell, that you want to move, that you're tired of being in your inventory. Okay, how are you going to relate that to your sales or your promotions, and how do you want to promote all of this? What's your marketing going to be?
Vivian: Those key dates that Chelsea just mentioned, if you guys want to get this stuff on a calendar, we've actually created a checklist for you to accompany this episode. What you'll see is we've divided it up by months. So what you should be doing in September, October, November, and then December. You guys pick and choose, mark off the stuff you want to do, anything else, just leave it sitting there. We also have these dates outlined in that download. So if you go to the link that Chelsea has posted down below in the description or right here on the screen, you guys will see it. Go ahead, go there and get the download, sign up for our email list. Then that way you guys will have it on your computer. You can physically print it out if you're an old school paper and pencil girl like me and keep it in your planner. That way it's a guide as you move forward in the coming months because we know you guys are busy and we want you not to have to think of all the things. We've thought of for you.
Chelsea: We did the work so you don't have to.
Vivian: That's right.
Chelsea: Yeah, Vivian, I think the key here and the point that I want to drive home is that we're telling you to start this so early so that you're not scrambling at the last minute. Let's say you come up with a great idea for some email marketing to promote what you have going on in the holidays. That's great. If you think of that in November, that's going to be really hard to push out.
Vivian: Yeah, and friendly reminder, it takes people many times to take action on something. They need reminders. Yes, so if you know you want to do something, but you don't quite know what promotion or what products and services. Even if it's not a discount or promotion, products and services that you want to push during that, they might be more suitable for gift giving, whatever it is.
Having that laid out ahead of time is going to give you the opportunity to go in and actually create social media posts ahead of time, and also email campaigns. The thing is, even though you may think, "Well great. I did one Facebook post on it, one Instagram post. That's enough." It's not.
Chelsea: Reminder it takes seven to eight touch points for someone to remember your business and be willing to make a purchase.
Vivian: We say that so you can line up your - maybe between now and the holiday season, you want to send out four emails, right? You've got enough time, you want to send out four emails to tell people or to spotlight the products and services for the gift giving season. You have plenty of time to give enough breather in between those weeks now, because you are planning it ahead of time. So just remember, you're going to have to repeat yourself. We actually have a whole podcast episode on repetition and its place in marketing. So there's plenty of room where you're not going to feel like a broken record right now, if you're setting it up and just getting all of that automated and ready to go.
Chelsea: The key there, automation. Y'all, this is why you want to do it early because you can schedule it out and then not worry about it later on. I'm glad you brought up social media because that's important, okay? Staying consistent on social media. We've had this conversation dozens of times. You want to be consistent. During the holiday season, y'all are stressed.
Vivian: Yes!
Chelsea: You are busy. Do you think you're going to remember to be consistent on social media? Maybe you will be, and I love that for you. But make it easy on yourself. Schedule out some of these posts promoting your products that you want to sell or maybe the sale or promotion that you have going on. If you can schedule those things out, one: you're staying consistent and two: you're making sure you're hitting those touch points.
Vivian: There are two things that you just jogged my memory about. So first and foremost, when it relates to email marketing, let me give you an idea of the different type of emails. Like if you're talking about: "Okay, Vivian, well, great. You say maybe I want to send like four emails out leading up until Christmas time". You can do teasers. "Hey, we have something big this holiday season." Maybe you're launching a new product, right? That would be the tie in.
Chelsea: Okay, so that would be the first email you send out.
Vivian: Then the launch, "hey, effective now you get this product with this small gift for this price" or whatever it is that you're launching. Reminder, right, because they've forgotten between the teaser, the launch, they have a billion emails in their inbox, so they forgot, so you need to remind them. And a last chance, so whenever your sale is about to end or perhaps you're pulling that product, a seasonal product off of the shelf, just a last minute reminder of, "get your orders in before this date so that way you guys can take advantage of it". Which leads me to reminder number two...
Chelsea: Real quick, Vivian, can I just say, Vivian just did the work for you. She just told you, you want to send out four emails, this is how you're going to send them out. So we made it so super simple. Follow that.
Vivian: Teaser, launch, reminder, last chance. All right, there you go. That's your ideas for the emails. Now you guys just go ahead and fill in the verbiage. All right. The second reminder is when we're talking about dates here, all right, like I just said before Christmas. That's not the reality of it. If you're pushing a product that is a gift that somebody can give to somebody else, you need to think further back because you need to think about the shipping time. All right. So dates that you want to go in and take a look at that we encourage our people in our SOB community. That's our membership community, by the way. You guys are welcome to join, $50 a month and you get to hop on calls with us every week. All right. But one of the things we were talking about recently is, hey, be thinking about when is going to be your cutoff date for you to be able to confidently tell someone they're going to get this in the mail before Christmas time.
Chelsea: This is something that should probably be a banner in your emails. Right at the top. Red. I don't want to say flashing, but make sure they see it.
Vivian: Absolutely, and to accompany that, this is moving into your next point, Chelsea. I see that you've posted or you've written here, use your real estate. Website. If you know that your cutoff date for somebody to be able to get their Christmas present in time for the 24th, because no one's delivering on the 25th. You need to be sure that on your website you have, place your orders by December 20th, right? So that it gives them enough shipping time. Actually it's probably could be before that because remember it gets super hectic during this time of year with the mail and all that goes on. So take advantage of that real estate.
Chelsea: Yes, real estate, just your entire online presence. Make sure it's optimized. You're telling people every place they can find you, you're giving them the relevant information.
Vivian: I'm going to pretend I'm Oprah because I do this every time we talk about real estate. "Congratulations. You have free digital real estate." As business owners, that is your website. If you maintain control of your website, you can change banners out. You can change, you have free real estate to use for messaging like this. If you have a Facebook page, that Facebook cover photo. Free real estate. Think of the stuff that you're utilizing and then how you can go about just taking up space and using everything ounce of it.
Chelsea: Yes. Love that.
*S.O.B. Community Ad*
Chelsea: STOP wasting your time Googling, "how to market my small business".
Vivian: Join the S.O.B. Community! Get templates, expert advice, weekly Zoom calls with us, and a supportive group of other business owners for - get this. Just $50 a month.
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Chelsea: I want to talk about product. So for all you SOB girlies and...men?
Vivian: Boy-sies.
Chelsea: And boysies, nevermind. We are all girlies in this SOB community.
Vivian: Gentlemen, I'm sorry. I apologize in advance for her.
Chelsea: My bad. For all of you that have actual product that you are pushing, let's use our data. You know, we're big about looking at your analytics and your data and hopefully you have this information. If not, maybe take this year to gather that information. But what was your top selling product last holiday season? Did you run out of it? If you did, then this season you might want to make sure you have more inventory. Did you have an underperforming product and you didn't know what to do with it? You had too much of it. Okay, probably don't stock up on that as much. Or maybe that could be, a lot of people during the holiday season like to do a free gift when you spend $100. Maybe that should be the free gift this year.
Vivian: Yes, and this works great as well for, the term trials comes to mind, but it's not what I'm looking for. What is it? Samples! Product samples. Let's say you sell soaps. There was one particular scrub or soap that didn't do well. Perhaps you can go ahead and create sample sizes of those to include as a gift, quote unquote. So that way it introduces the product to somebody. You may be able to generate some more interest in it down the road by capitalizing on this big holiday season, right? The other thing too is, maybe you guys are thinking about changing the sizing of your products as well because sometimes for the holidays, people are looking for something that they could give pouches or varieties of things, right? That also introduces your product to new people.
Chelsea: Yeah, Vivian, you can make this really easy on customers too and just create gift baskets.
Vivian: Yes, or gift bags that they just come in and buy.
Chelsea: Let's be honest, some people don't want to think about it. They just want to be able to say, good, perfect. This also makes me think of the conversation we had with Rae on one of our podcast episodes. Rae, "The Design Demon". We have two episodes.
Vivian: That's the name of her business. Okay. She's not calling her a design demon, all right. I want to clarify.
Chelsea: My bad. Rae owns "The Design Demon". It is a jewelry, well, she does more than jewelry. She has hats and stuff like that. But she is the Design Demon that is her business. My bad. We have multiple conversations with her on this podcast. So go check out those conversations, those episodes. But I remember her mentioning that during the holiday season, she focuses on smaller pieces because they can be stocking stuffers. And people are looking for stocking stuffers and not like big extravagant gifts sometimes. So maybe you want to convert some things to make it a stocking stuffer.
Vivian: Yeah, I do like how you led into this particular point, talking point though, with the data part because I do think that's extremely important. When we're talking about scheduling out your social media post, getting your email marketing campaigns kind of on the schedule and set, what I would recommend and something that Chelsea and I do religiously is we have an email list and we send weekly emails to them. We look at the open rates. We look to see how many people unsubscribe. We notice, are they looking at it on their phones or are they looking at it on their desktop and laptop? This is all data that we can use in the future. If you guys are sending out these emails, like she said, they're going to be giving you data that you can use for next year to better improve how you're setting up these holiday sales. But it can also be telling if, Chelsea just told us at the very beginning and you guys are telling us in the comments below if you're team capitalism or team Thanksgiving, if she just said, hey, the second most popular day for people to shop is Thanksgiving Day. Let's say you send, maybe you're like, hey, let me try something out. Let me actually send an email on Thanksgiving where it's a nice message upfront, but then at the bottom, it spotlights some products and just some quick flash sales that we're doing.
If you send this out an email and you notice by looking at the data that you actually have gotten a lot of open rates on it, very few people have unsubscribed and you actually made some sales from it. This is something that you can start putting two and two together in the future to be like, wow. Okay, maybe my big day is going to be a little earlier than waiting for Christmas, right?
Chelsea: So we're letting capitalism win. I'm kidding. I have one more thing with products. I love this. Small business owners, you are all about community and interacting with other small businesses. This is a perfect time to have limited edition products and work with other small businesses to provide like a whole holiday bag with, do you get what I'm saying?
Vivian: For other people to get involved so you guys can team up and sell more.
Chelsea: Team up with other small businesses. Sorry, y'all, I explained that very poorly.
Vivian: No, to your point, we like to use the word adjacent. If it's adjacent to what you're doing, let's say for example, let's go with the soap example I had earlier. If I sell soaps and scrubs, it would be a good idea for me to maybe reach out to somebody that sells loofahs. They do, I don't know, homemade loofahs or whatever, because that's a thing you can do. or something that...
Chelsea: Or like a candle.
Vivian: Yes. Or lotion, something that's in line with what you're doing. Candles really great. Go to your local home decor store owner and say, by the way, do you want to get in with me on this? We can all promote it as these holiday gift baskets or bags and packages. That way you're utilizing and taking advantage of their following as well.
Chelsea: Thank you Vivian.
Vivian: I understood what you were meaning.
Chelsea: Sometimes my head is way ahead of my mouth.
Vivian: That's a way to put it.
Chelsea: The thoughts are going too quickly for me to say them.
Vivian: The other thing I want to bring up was gift cards. Prime time, you guys, to be able to go out there and promote these. This is one of those great, I think of them as like gap gifts, okay? There's somebody you just don't know what to get them, you're selling soaps, you're like, "hey, if you don't know what scent or the preference of the person you're buying, great. Give them our gift card and they can pick and choose for themselves". Right? There's a way for you to kind of curate that message so that you can promote. It benefits your business because at the end of the day, that's cash in hand for you. It doesn't matter, I don't want to say this in a bad way, but it doesn't matter if they actually come in and buy anything.
Chelsea: Okay. Honestly, y'all let's get a little real, everyone circle in.
Vivian: Capitalism.
Chelsea: Come in for a second. A lot of people don't use their gift cards.Gift cards are one of those things that you don't necessarily, it could sometimes be free money. So.
*Voiceover* Studies show that around 30% of people don't use their gift cards.
Vivian: The thought and the intention is well, right? Well-meaning people...
Chelsea: I'm sorry. I just thought I have a Cheesecake Factory gift card that I've had for probably five years now.
Vivian: I wonder if it expires in like 10 years.
Chelsea: It probably does. I'm going to have to find it and I'm going to have to look if it expired already. Cause it's, it's been a while. I think the closest Cheesecake Factory is in North Carolina. I'm not going to North Carolina for the Cheesecake Factory y'all.
Vivian: First of all, I'm not going to Cheesecake Factory cause they have a 30 page menu and that stresses me out.
Chelsea: That too.
Vivian: But to your point. The intent - when people are going to buy that gift card, it really is well meaning. They want to shower somebody and let them pick and choose. I don't want to buy you a gift that you're not going to use. So I'd rather just give you a gift card to a place that I know you'll like their product and then you pick the product or the service, right? If you're doing massages, hairstylist, that's also something. But the key here, like Chelsea said, is the truth of the matter is that sometimes that is cash in your register and you don't have to worry about whether somebody's coming in and actually using the card, right? If they're like Chelsea and have a five year old gift card to Cheesecake Factory. Because those people are walking amongst us, apparently.
Chelsea: You know, my bad. Our last point, Vivian, and one that I really want to drive home. Y'all, do not forget about your existing customers. I know we've said this a bunch. We had an entire episode about existing customers. Go listen to that too if you haven't. But these are the people that they cost less money and are likely to spend more with you.
Vivian: What she means, she's tripping up on her words today. They cost less money, meaning it costs less money to reach them and to get them to convert to a sale.
Chelsea: I mean, yes. Sorry, I could have been clearer.
Vivian: We value them a lot. They physically do not cost less money. They cost equal moneys, capitalism. I know what you meant. It's actually true. The data shows that it costs five times less to reach existing customers and to get them to convert to a sale. What we're hoping is that perhaps you shift your mindset a little bit and start with your existing customers. All right, there's no problem in having two different campaigns going. You can have a campaign for existing customers and you can have a campaign for new customers. All the difference is really just in, yes, you're tweaking the message a little, but also because hopefully you're collecting some of this data. If someone's bought from you before, you have a little more information on them that we're hoping you will leverage in your favor. Capitalism.
Chelsea: Yes, capitalism. So you can personalize that message. You can focus on informing them about sales, about products that they in the past have been interested in, stuff like that. Also, maybe you want to give them like a little 10% off discount or something like that. Show them your appreciation. I feel like that can go a long way during the holidays.
Vivian: Even if it's not a discount, one of our community members, actually has a group that you're a part of on Instagram. It's, I always mess this up. What is it?
Chelsea: It's a broadcast channel.
Vivian: Yes. If you have a broadcast channel where somebody who follows you on Instagram has opted into, right? So they're basically saying, I'm a super fan. Tell me all the things.
Vivian: Girl, are you not a part of any broadcast channels?
Chelsea: No, I always get the invites. when people blast it out. I always get the invites and I just haven't clicked yes on any of them.
Chelsea: I'm a part of so many broadcast channels.
Vivian: So here's the thing is like Chelsea has done, she has opted into these things. She gets the invite and she's like, yes, yes, and yes. Give me all the details. We want you to give them all the details because they're asking you for them. One of the things you can do, like she said, okay, perhaps you give them a 10 % discount. You don't have to. If you don't want to do it by discounting your product or service, no problem. What you can do is utilize that broadcast channel, that email list, that closed Facebook group, whatever it is, and literally say, Hey, I'm going to give you guys a preview of the stuff we're doing for the holiday season on this day. Or just type it out and give them say, Hey, here's a sneak peek. You guys are hearing this first. That is a way to make someone feel appreciated. "I'm getting some news before everybody else. Yes, yes. Give me the tea." But that's one of the ways you could go about it. So take full advantage of the existing groups that you guys have, the super fans, the people that have said, I'm so interested in your business that, I want you to send me emails, send me messages, tell me what's going on.
Chelsea: I think that's our conversation today. So are we ready for the TLDL?
Vivian: We are. Go ahead.
Chelsea: Okay. TLDL chapter too long, didn't listen. If you skipped ahead to this section, I'm glad you're here. When you have time, go listen to this entire conversation. So today we talked about holiday season marketing, why you want to start now. Yes, it's the end of September. You still should start right now because it gives you time to organize, gives you time to plan out and understand everything that you're going to be doing. Consider what products you're going to be pushing out or getting more inventory of, what marketing campaigns are you going to be focusing on. Remember important dates. Black Friday, small business Saturday, Thanksgiving apparently. Take advantage of your online real estate and make sure you are sharing all the information across all the platforms. Touch points are important. You want to be repetitive because people are not going to hear your message every single time you say it. So you want to hit them multiple times. Lastly, just don't forget about your existing customers. These are likely your brand evangelists, the people who are going to spend the most money with you. So make sure that you have an idea of what you want to do when it comes to targeting them as well.
Vivian: Don't forget, we have actually put a checklist together for you guys to help guide you through this season. So that way you don't have to think about all the things you need to put on your to-do list. We've done it for you. We've created the work for you. No, I'm joking. Just go down to the link below. Chelsea's also going to put it in the description. It's free and we've divided all of the tasks into things you should be doing September, October, November and December. Let us know if you find that useful and take advantage of it. Also, if you're here, this is episode 120 something.
Chelsea: 130 something.
Vivian: We have a ton of other episodes for you to binge. So go over there, subscribe and just go through them. We share all kinds of different marketing information, experience, knowledge, tips, strategies, all of that good stuff, updates.
We bring you the latest and greatest stuff and we want you to be able to go out there, manage your marketing in-house confidently because that's what it's all about.
Chelsea: Yes. And oh, before I say the line, don't forget to leave in the comments whether you're a team Thanksgiving or team capitalism, and go be the best SOB you can be.