Holidays are usually a busy time for many businesses. It’s that time when sales move at the highest speed. This is also the same for printing businesses and the industry at large. If you are looking to capitalize on this during a holiday and try to boost your revenue on a massive scale, you have to make sure that your marketing efforts during the holiday are top-notch, heads and shoulders above the rest. This will guarantee you that you get a share of the cake.
You have to take your holiday efforts much more seriously than before. It is also never too early to start your marketing for a holiday. Google also revealed that many shoppers start their research about things they will buy during the previous holiday market. So, if you’re going to plan for next year’s Valentine’s Day holiday, you need to start from this year. Starting your holiday marketing early enough ensures that you can win them over to you, and they can buy from you when they are ready to make the purchase.
As a print business, you help other businesses to shape their brand and influence buyers to buy during the holiday season. So, print media is essential for other businesses even more during Valentine’s Day and other festive periods. Despite having competition, you should be quick with your marketing tactics to attract more businesses (customers) to your print business. You can leverage the best graphic design with eye-catching colors for your marketing campaign during the holiday. This way, you are sure of maximum exposure to prospects and customers.
With the holidays come plenty of opportunities to make sales as a small business. The best part of holiday marketing is that you do not have to spend a fortune on it. It can as well be effortless.
To make the most of the opportunity that holidays present, here are some of the best marketing holidays ideas you can adopt for your printing business.
Best Marketing Holiday Ideas
Connect with your current customers
One of the easiest ways to benefit from marketing is to reach out to people who are already your customers. This will serve as a reminder to them if they have needs for making prints during the holiday, and it could also push them into deciding if they were not sure of making a print design during the holiday.
Since they’ve patronized you earlier, you will have their information with you, so send them greeting cards. For instance, you can send Valentine’s greeting card, and with this, you can include exclusive offers and discounts or a holiday promo for them if you like. But reaching out to them is worth something too. While the greeting card might not get you any patronage immediately, it creates an impression with them that would last long.
In order to prove how effective this is, a USPS survey revealed
that 87% of millennials like to receive prints and 82% of those see it as trustworthy
While the older generation also loves to receive the print, it’s not as much as millennials. However, this shows that greeting cards can help you generate sales and create long-term advocates for your brand.
Connect with local or online businesses
Another way for you to increase your sales during the holiday period is to team up with other local or online businesses. Since print gifts are effective with customers during the holiday, these businesses will be looking to send some to their customers. Instead of waiting for them to approach you, or worse still, walk past you to the next print shop, why not make the first move?
Walk up to the business owners and ask about their holiday promotion; what’s their plan? Pitch your business to them and how you can help them create prints for their holiday marketing or create gifts that they can give to their customers (even if it’s as little as a complementary card).
You can also agree with them to cross-promote each other, organize a joint social media campaign. This is even more effective for you if both businesses are complementary or in very close proximity to yourselves.
Reach out to nearby homes
Your print business will rely on diverse kinds of customers, but you can’t rule out the locals’ demand in your area. So it would be best if you tried to reach out to them via their homes. One way for you to do this is to send door hangers so that they have an idea of any promotions, discounts, and other holiday offers that you might be offering to boost your business.
As a printing business, the way you go about designing, creating, and printing the door hangers tells a lot about your craft and how good you are. So you can’t be casual about it. Another advantage of this is that it does not need that you have a mailing list. Also, the message you are sending is getting to the line of sight of your target.
Have special hours for your business during the holiday
During the holiday period, you would need to change your schedule a little bit. You have to try and accommodate those people that will need your service for the late hours. Whatever changes you are making and whenever you are doing this, make sure to announce it to your customers through your social media pages and those items that you sent out to them (door hangers, greeting cards, etc.), and through posters and banners. Since you are making the change to accommodate them, it is only right that they are well informed of it.
Help a local charity out.
You can create events to create more awareness about your business. Beyond creating awareness, you can use that opportunity to do good and show love to others during Valentine’s and other holidays. One way to do this is by helping a charity.
All you need to do is get a charity organization and offer them your help. This can be through donating your expertise and time to provide them with something that they need or offer them donations and pledges from your employees, customers, and other local businesses taking part in the event.
The most obvious way to raise your business profile through an event such as this is not donating money (by all means, do). But to grow your business profile, contribute your expertise and time. Do something for them that they can’t do on their own. You could even teach them how. This also allows you to build relationships along the lane.
You can either make this charity event a yearly event or a one-off event to have a long-lasting effect on the school and the children. You can help them with the charity’s marketing efforts and use your resources to create donations for them.
Give out gifts for the holiday.
Gifts are a common feature of Valentine’s holiday. As lovers exchange gifts among themselves and businesses give their loyal customers gifts, you should not be left out. You’ve had people who patronized your brand throughout the year. This is your time to repay them with a token. It is a small gift that does not even have to eat deep into your company’s purse. You can start by thinking of gift ideas that you think your customers would love and try to get them for them. You can get different gifts for individuals based on what you think they prefer or get one kind of gift for your loyal customers. Another type of gift you can give your customers is practical gifts, which they will need to use. Examples of some cheap small gift ideas for your customers this holiday are:
- Business cardholders
- Personalized pens
- Pocket notebooks
- Calendar
- Fortune cookies
- Gift baskets
It will surprise you that although these seem little, your customers will appreciate it a lot and keep it for a long while.
Sponsor local artists
You can sponsor local artists in your area to create more awareness for your business. You could create a space in your shop or somewhere around it to hold exhibitions for these artists. It could be local visual artists, musicians, poets, and other kinds of artists that can pull an audience and wow them. Then use the space you are providing them to display holiday arts, readings, recitals, etc.
This will turn out positively for your business as you will be able to create better and stronger connections with people in that community while also serving as an outlet for people with creative talent to let it out by expressing themselves before an audience.
Conclusion
There are many ways that your printing business can take advantage of the holidays as an opportunity to market yourself. It might not necessarily be an easy task, but it will be worth it in the end. One advantage of doing this is that it puts you in the minds of your customers and people in your location, and it is easier for them to patronize you long term this way.
Author Bio: Joshua Sharp is a professional writer and blogger from Oxford, working as a journalist in local custom papers. He is interested in traveling, different cultures, and social connections. He started work as an author of the blog, which connected with cultural differences. Likewise, he is professional in media, art, public relations, and different news. Also, he is fond of psychology.