We might still be a ways out from Halloween this year, but as the holiday season progressively gets closer, time seems to go by faster and faster. Many product-based (and even service-based) companies, including small businesses, usually anticipate significantly higher sales volumes and revenue. This is especially the case if you are a retail or ecommerce store as millions of Americans and shoppers around the world will spend money and shop for gifts in order to prepare for major holidays such as Christmas. In any case, your small business is bound to get…well, busier. So, are you prepared for what’s to come?
The Commercial Finance Group Can Help Prepare Your Business For The Holiday Season
In 2013, consumers spent a whopping $57 billion on Black Friday weekend alone. That’s quite the stimulation of the economy! Now, you’ll want to make sure that you have enough inventory on hand, and so your business may need an advance on working capital to make sure that you have the funds necessary to be prepared for the increased volume of business.
If you’re waiting on any payments from any vendors, clients, suppliers or anyone else that you do business with, then you’ll definitely want to make sure that you have sufficient capital. With our unique and flexible small business lending solutions, The Commercial Finance Group makes it easy for your company to get business done on time. Learn more about finance factoring, one of our lending methods, by visiting here.
Now, let’s take an in-depth look at some of the things that you can do to help prepare your small business for the holiday season.
Get Input From Your Team
Meeting with your staff is a valuable use of your time, and it is highly important that you include their input in this process. If your business has been around long enough and you’ve had people working for your company long enough, ask your team what they noticed last year during the holiday season. What was their experience like from their perspective? Do they think that things were successful in general, or did they think that certain things just failed miserably? The input of your hires is as valid, if not more valid, than your own input due to inherent bias as the owner of your business.
This is also an ideal opportunity to discuss holiday schedules, special hours, time off with coworkers, and so forth. Additional holiday hours are typically needed in order to accommodate additional sales and orders, so consider developing another schedule that accounts for additional hours for your staff. Keep in mind that staffing additional man hours might be ‘out of the norm’ for your business, so try and think of ways to incentivize your employees to work overtime. While the most obvious and popular way is through a monetary incentive, you can also try offering additional time off after the holidays or even gift incentives. Ultimately, you’re the boss, so it’s up to you.
Stay Organized
Good organization is key, right? Well, during the busier times, staying organized can become more difficult. This raises the point of what you can practically do ahead of time in order to make sure that everything is in proper order. For one, if you own a brick-and-mortar location, getting organized includes making sure that your location is clean and holiday-ready. And yes, even if you’re more of a ‘plain jane’ when it comes to decorating your store, getting organized and prepared for the holidays does include ordering holiday decorations and cards if you do not already have them.
The holiday season (or just prior to the holiday season, actually) is also the time that you should order any additional supplies that you may need. There are a lot of free online tools out there that are particularly useful during holiday season preparation including inventory tracking systems and even social media marketing management systems. If your marketing budget is tight and you need to advertise digitally on a time, this is a great way to do so.
Again, scheduling ahead of time is a vitally important form of organization. After you have met with your staff and you have determined the amount of personnel that you need, start scheduling their hours now – by preparing the schedule ahead of time, you will not have to worry about it later when you are totally swamped with clients, orders, and other business matters. Given your experience owning a business, you know that there will always be emergencies or situations that you cannot foresee, so it’s always a smart idea to make sure that your business is not short staffed. If anything, depending on your type of business, it may be a good idea to hire additional seasonal staff members if your budget will allow for it.
Give Your Policies A Review
If you want to effectively counteract any holiday season-related hiccups (and honestly, what business owner wouldn’t?), consider reviewing your current business strategies. Take the feedback that you got from your staff and then implement it into your policies. During this busy time, it should be imperative that your customer service is absolutely impeccable – better than it ever has been before. Why? This will help ensure repeat business all year round. So, when it comes to those potentially outdated returns and shipping policies, give them a good review.
Is Free Shipping A Smart Idea?
Have you heard of Free Shipping Day? It’s pretty self-explanatory. As it relates to shipping, some businesses participate in Free Shipping Day. While this can certainly attract customers to your business, it is important to make sure that this process is a smooth one. If you do decide to participate in this, make sure that your policies are updated to reflect it. Sure, there may be some hiccups initially, but if you plan for them, these hiccups don’t have to turn into a full-blown headache.
Marketing Ahead Of Time
After you have met with your staff and come up with a plan to embrace the transaction-fueled holiday season, you should strategize. In order to reap the benefits of the holiday season, it makes sense to develop a holiday marketing plan to increase your profits. Read below for a few basic marketing strategies that might pan out to be very useful in promoting your small business during (or before, rather) the holiday season.
Creative Marketing
People enjoy creative things, even when it comes to marketing and advertisements. Doing something different and meaningful will help you stand out of the crowd from your competitors. Things like hand-written thank you notes to clients, vendors or frequent customers, as well as well-designed social media shoutouts, really show the receiving party that they’re appreciated. Plus, when you go the extra mile to do those kinds of nice things, chances are that they’ll also go the extra mile to tell someone about what you did or made for them. Everyone wins!
Promotions and Sales
Black Friday and Cyber Monday go hand-in-hand with discounts and sales – that’s exactly what those ‘holidays’ are known for, after all. So, this is a great time to entice your existing customer base with discounted products and services. Use this powerful marketing tool to your advantage by sending targeted incentives like coupons and exclusive deals to a preferred customer list. While promoting the business, it may be a good idea to inform your clients of any pre-holiday promotions that you’re having as well. Just make sure not to go too overboard, because you still need to make a profit in order to continue running a viable and successful business!
Content Marketing
Like your regular marketing plan, in anticipation of the holiday influx of business, make sure that your SEO and general content marketing is wisely implemented. To help you decide what may or may not work, go back to your previous years’ campaigns and analytics. What are the trends for this year? When looking at the latest digital marketing trends, it’s a good idea to uncover what people are searching for related to your industry as well as the holidays. So, make sure that your SEO is on track by researching historical trends for keywords.
Also, as far as any content goes, we urge you to make sure that you are using your content to inform your customers, but also cleverly tie the content into the holidays at the same time. To reinforce your new content, you can do so by sending out email or text message (SMS) campaigns. Just keep in mind that engagement is the key to getting through to your audience and target market, so engage them and get them excited about the upcoming holidays!
Is Your Website Ready For The Holidays?
If you’re not sure how to answer this question, then you very well might need to make some important changes to your website. Indeed, more customers are becoming online customers, and so it is important that your website is running smoothly and able to handle new customers in addition to your existing, trustworthy clientele.
Your website must be able to accommodate all of the sales that you are going to receive, so take the time now to work out any bugs or kinks that might interfere with the customer having a smooth ecommerce and online checkout process. Following this, don’t forget to double check and troubleshoot all payment processing – you obviously don’t want to lose out on any potential revenue just because your site was down or because your merchant credit processing was having issues.
While we’re at it, update your website with all necessary holiday information including things like holiday hours and any additional policies as they relate to shipping, returns, and special pricing. Ideally, the key to good website preparedness is making sure that your website is ready to accommodate higher levels of traffic.
Leave Financing Up To The Professionals
As a small business owner, there’s a lot that you can do for your own company by yourself. That being said, there’s also some things like working capital solutions and finance factoring services that are better left to the professionals here at The Commercial Finance Group. So, if your business needs additional working capital to get ramped up for the holiday season, don’t try and hassle with the banks. Contact our factoring company for cash flow solutions today!
