Navigating the Holiday Season

The holiday season can be busy and stressful for many small businesses. While business may be up, the high volumes of traffic that the holiday season tends to bring can be overwhelming for ill-prepared enterprises.

Finding yourself and your businesses swept up in the last few hectic months of the year is the last thing you’d want. In this article, we’ll go over ways to avoid overworking yourself and your business and ways to use the season for promotions.

Making sure your work is productive.

Taking the time to ensure the work you do for your small business is consistent, fulfilling, and productive is necessary. The holiday season can make this hard to achieve due to the high influx of business you may get.

Here are some tips on how to avoid losing sight of making sure your work is progressive for your business:

1. Begin planning around the August and September months.

Planning for how your business will run, promote, and handle business during the holiday months should be done as early as possible. Doing so ensures that you’ll be well prepared for what the season could bring and gives you time to come up with backup plans if things don’t go how you expect.

Planning should include:

• - Studying consumer trends.
• - Making a holiday schedule.
• - Figuring out holiday budgets.
• - Ensure ways to properly communicate holiday schedules and plans with your employees for seamless workflow.

For established businesses, past holiday metrics can be a great source of information for planning around what your own business does. For new businesses who may not have a lot of holiday business history to look back on, trends and statistics for what to expect typically come out around 2nd to 3rd quarter, giving you a good starting point on what to expect and plan for.

2. Make a realistic to-do list.

It may be tempting to slam out as much work as possible, and it may seem necessary. If you try and plan on doing more work than you can realistically do, it could not only affect business morale but also the quality of the work your business does.

Doing more than you can realistically do can cause you to rush, cut corners, and produce low-quality products and results for your customers and clients, which can negatively impact your business’ reputation.

3. Make sure your website is up to date.

For businesses that run partially or all online, check your website to ensure it is not only up to date but also prepared to handle an influx of business it may not usually be used to. Suppose a website is not prepared for higher volumes of traffic. In that case, it can make it run slow, crash, or negatively alter a customer's shopping experience in other ways that may make them less likely to become returning customers.

Promoting during the holidays.

Your holiday promotions will be different than your promotions throughout the year. For many businesses, this time of the year has the highest spending on promotions compared to any other time. Some do as much as double their marketing budget for the holidays compared to the rest of their annual budget.

With marketing and advertisements being so important during this part of the year, here are some ways you can have your businesses advertise for the holidays:

1. Decorate your business.

While this may seem out of place, decorating for the holidays can do more than you may think. Some of the common emotions people feel during the holidays are “Joy and Gratitude.”

Decorating your business, if you have a physical store or office space, can help bring these feelings into your business. In doing so, you get a chance to improve business morale. Happy customers and clients are more likely to stay and spend more money, and happy employees will produce better work results. Decorating can be like a little office or store tree, window designs, holiday music, or other holiday-themed items and decorations to help bring a little holiday cheer to your small business.

2. Promote a drive.

This may seem odd, just like decorating your office, but it has its place. Running a donation through your business can help you connect more with your community. It can help spread the word about your business for those who like to partake in donations throughout the holiday season.

Some popular donations businesses like to run are:

• - Toy drives
• - Food donations
• - Clothing donations
• - Monetary donations

Giving back to the community that helps keep your business afloat is the best way to help build a positive reputation and image of your business that can help promote it and provide growth opportunities.

3. Run paid seasonal ads.

Running paid ads is normal for businesses, but making sure your ads are holiday-themed is an important step to ensure your business stays in the mix of potential options for consumers to want to go to. These ads can include sales you may have specifically for the holidays, promoting popular and sought-after gift ideas your business provides, and, in general, just letting the public know your business is a good place to go for their holiday shopping needs.

The holiday season can be hectic and stressful for many businesses and business owners. It doesn’t have to be, though, with proper planning and engagement.

If you would like assistance in figuring out how to prepare your small business for the holidays so you can go through it at the best of your abilities, contact Comprehensive Consulting Solutions for Small Businesses, and we’d be more than happy to help your business navigate the holiday season in stride. Check out these other helpful articles for more ways CCSSB can help your small business:

• - Online Networking and Making Connections on LinkedIn
• - Lead Follow-Up and Why It is Important to Small Businesses - Calendaring and Prioritization