You Know Your Customers, Now Learn the Holiday

This month we’ve been focusing on holiday marketing and a lot of it has focused on knowing your customers. Today, it’s about knowing the holiday. Not just the meaning of the holiday season, peace, love and joy. But knowing how it really makes your customers and clients feel. 

In digital marketing, we talk a lot about providing valuable content. One of the easiest ways to decide value is how it helps alleviate the stresses in your customer or client’s life. The holiday season is full of stress. From travel to family, budget to work deadlines, everything in the last few months of the year is designed to get your blood pressure up. Consumers and businesses alike, are looking to us to help solve these problems for them.

Know their stress and help them during the last stretch? They’ll be loyal to you forever. Waste their money, or worse their time? Don’t expect to see that person again.

Here are a few ways you can be seasonally savvy and help your customers during their crunch time.

Harness the power of urgency.

The next two months are going to pass by at the speed of light. As a collective community, we only have one more month to get everything done. Work schedules are wrapping up in six weeks and people will be flying out of the country on vacation. We have a limited amount of time to shop, bake, cook, and spend time with family before our schedules are entirely filled up. Time is of the essence right now and everything is an emergency.

Understand that your customers are operating under pressure during the holiday season. If you’re a retail store, make sure that your in-store experience helps them save time. Have all of your tills open and provide gift catalogues at the front door. Do you have a website? Let your customers know when they need to make their purchases in order to get their gifts in time for Christmas. Don’t leave any piece of information uncommunicated, make sure they have all of the information they need before they even ask the question. They’ll thank you for saving them the time during an already hectic shopping season.

If you’re in the business-to-business world, make sure you know what your hard deadlines are in December. If your client is closing their office on the 20th for the holidays, you should deliver by the 15th. Know that their time is as finite as yours as the season rolls to an end. If you can finish a project before the new year so they’re coming back to a clear desk, they will be eternally grateful.

In B2B selling, you can capitalize on this feeling of crunchtime by expressing how you can save your clients time this season while they finish up what’s actually important.

It’s all about understanding what their needs are as the season wraps up and catering to them specifically. They’ll remember a good experience during the holiday season just as long as a negative one.

Understand what they’re worried about. 

So we’ve covered that your customers are worried, but understand the crucial stressors of the holidays and figure out how you can alleviate those worries with your product or service. 

Everyone is worried about three things during the holidays; time, energy, and money. We’ve already established that time is a finite resource in the last two months of the year, but their energy is just as important. However, the resource that everyone worries about this time of year is money.

We all want to give our friends and families everything they want when it comes to unwrap their gifts, so most of us are on a tight budget. In the business world, budgets are just as tight with work slowing down in December and already allocated money nearing the top end of the budget.

Keep these things in mind when you’re deciding what kind of value you want to provide to your customers in November and December.

We’ve already covered how you can save them time, but consider how you could save your customer some energy. Maybe they have a little bit more time this afternoon and they’ve entered your record shop looking for a specific genre of music. If you know the cash register will be busy, consider having someone on the floor meeting people at the door and guiding them to the music for which they’re looking. They’ll be thankful for the one-on-one experience and you’ll have saved them a ton of energy looking for a specific record.

Maybe you’re a butcher and you have the capability to set aside orders for ham and turkey. Think about taking orders via a secure web form and scheduling pick-up days. You’ll already have taken their payment and will know when they’re picking up their Christmas order ahead of time. You’ll save your customers the experience of waiting in line and not knowing what to order, plus you’ll be able to make more in-store time for those that aren’t ready to buy online.

Sales are popular during this time of year because stores are trying to clear out old stock and businesses are trying to fill up their employee time as the year draws to a close. But, it’s also a wise move if you’re being cognizant of your customer’s budget. Be careful with this, you don’t want to discount yourself out of business.

Think about what you’re feeling. 

That looming crunch that you feel as the holidays roll up and 2019 comes to a close is a universal experience. Whether you’re selling B2B, own a retail store, or work a 9-to-5, we’re all worried about Christmas.

Think about how you could custom tailor your marketing and services in November and December to solve some of your own problems and you’ll probably be helping out your clients and customers too.

Are you worried about the end of the year? Are you stressed out that you have done enough for the holiday season yet? Don’t stress out too much. Feel free to give us a call and we can help put you on the right track for the holidays.