Best November Marketing Ideas and Tips
The holiday rush is nearly here as fall presses on, let’s take a look at some marketing activities you should be thinking about that could drastically increase your holiday season sales!
In 2019 US shoppers spent nearly 20% more online than they did in the previous year and a nearly 5% total increase in total holiday shopping sales from 2018. Generally, the “holiday rush season” is between Black Friday and Dec 24. However, that season is constantly being lengthened to include more time in November and even more and more offers online in October.
Online sales will increase due to the covid19’s ongoing presence and will find more shoppers preferring to shop online than in person. Overall sales numbers are predicted to stay flat or slightly increase in total volume from 2019. This is actually pretty impressive given the shaky stake of global economies throughout 2020 due to the pandemic, with overall US unemployment high and GDP figures at 2009 recession levels.
1. Get the offers ready!
Your marketing should largely be pushing offers and holiday-related sales. These could any manner of deal that is promoted through a variety of media channels. You want to take a look at offers that will grab the attention of your audience and get them on your website or in your store! Often these are considered loss leaders but certainly don’t have to be, many times these also are limited inventory offerings. Both of these strategies give retailers and brands more confidence to keep prices low at losing or most likely near break-even pricing, but preventing a high volume of these items from being sold to hurt overall financial performance.
2. Previous Customers are Key!
Previous customers will likely represent more than half of your total sales. In some cases, brands see that around 80% of sales are from previous customs, which means that you need to absolutely be marketing to existing customers through any method you can. Often this takes the form of email marketing campaigns that are segmented and targeted to preexisting customers with offers that can be customized to them.
3. Black Friday
Black Friday has become a national shopping time for nearly every industry and brand imaginable. You need to take advantage of this event since almost all consumers are now in the mindset of shopping throughout the black Friday shopping time. Make sure to include black Friday branding and mention in marketing materials in the month or so prior to black Friday teasing your sale and hyping up the event. Many brands also choose to utilize some of “Black Friday all month long” as a way to offer special deals and discounts throughout the month. Particularly for automotive retailers, it is near-standard practice for top performing dealerships to run something similar throughout the month.
4. Plan your Marketing Channels
The best way to promote brand and sales events is clearly planned out the different offers you want to run and document what media channels you will be using, how much you are comfortable spending on advertising and the scheduling of all content. Marketing channels can be everything from Facebook ads, social media content, paid google ppc, broadcast/cable television, radio, sponsorships, events, and more. Just clearly plan out how much you want to spend at each using prior year’s data to determine what has been shown to be your best ROI on marketing spend, but don’t discount and drop certain channels altogether, this rarely is a positive result!
5. Crafting Content
Work with your marketing partners to create similar looking ads across your different media channels, but tweaking content for different audiences. This will give your brand a very cohesive and professional look to potential customers while keeping your marketing material engaging to consumers. The better looking and more engaging your content is, the higher the audience engagement will be which will increase CTR’s for digital and overall increase any advertising ROI.
6. Leverage Social Media to Tease Offers
Social Media can be a great source of views as you tease content to build up your black Friday and November events. Make use of posts such as “ Check back on Wednesday Nov 3, to see our 2020 Black Friday Deals released!” etc, there are many ways to make your black Friday sale into more of an event, but teasing the offers is a very common way many larger brands handle it and can be very effective as well for smaller companies.
7. Brush on up Reviews
Potential customers will be checking your reviews, so as you prepare for the holiday sales rush, make sure to give some attention if needed to your reviews. If your reviews aren’t as numerous or as good as you believe they should be, reach out to previous customers that you believe had a good experience and ask them for a review. This is commonly through email and can pay huge dividends as consumers are much more likely to spend money with firms that are rated highly. Don’t forget facebook reviews as well.
8. Make sure your website is working well
The last thing you want to happen is to push a lot of traffic to your website just to have not to impress users, look back, or for it to not transition to mobile, or simply not function great, including any online store. You want to make it easy for people to give you their money! So thoroughly check through your website to make sure everything is working and responding well. Remember, your website is nearly always the first impression you have on potential customers and around 50% of all web traffic is via mobile devices!
9. Get your Team Ready
This sounds cliché, but make sure your team is aware and well versed in the offers you are running, how any discounts or special deals work, and they are fluently able to communicate with customers the specifics of your sales event. Also, prepare your team to be much busier than normal! Offering additional performance incentives for profit or volume targets is a great way to get customers to go the extra mile with your company. Even small gestures through the holiday rush make a big difference to employee drive and attitude. Don’t forget that you need to maintain a safe work environment for all employees as the pandemic burns on. If you have in-person sales, prepare your store to safely handle the extra volume of people and provide any needed PPE as well as arrange additional facility cleaning.
10. Record Everything
Make notes and collect as much data as you can on what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to your holiday marketing plan and sales offers. It’s completely normal for something’s to not work well, but that’s the price to pay for constantly experimenting with your marketing to find what unexpectedly does work well.
The Black Friday and Holiday sales rush is basically in our laps already! Now is not the time to let up on your marketing or lose focus, now is the time to make or break your 4th quarter. While 2020 will be different than any year prior due to covid19, there is still significant consumer spending occurring which can transform your brand and put a strong finish on the year if done correctly! If you need help crafting a black Friday or holiday marketing plan or creating content, give a shout! We’ve created numerous black Friday advertisements for small and large businesses and worked as a top Tennessee marketing agency to build content with numerous businesses.
Check out more of our marketing work Here.
Volan Media are Tennessee marketing experts, having made hundreds of pieces of content for a variety of marketing channels, coordinating strategy and media placement, improving web traffic, and are veterans at working with various brands marketing requirements and adapting to marketing budgets of any size and scope.
Give us a shout if you want to take your automotive marketing to the next level!
