Stop the winters sales slump with smart marketing

Like it or not, winter can be a slow time for a lot of businesses. Days are short, cold and wet;  people don’t want to be out and about when they can be warm and dry. Peoples ‘essentials’ spending goes up too, as they use more power and eat more food during this time. All of this means that there is less money to be spent and less time where they may spend it. So as a non-essential business how can you get people to spend it with you? More importantly is how to do it without costing you so much that you spend more than what you make in the increased sales

Here are a few smart marketing tips that you can apply to your business right  now.

Identify what services or products you have that would suit the winter environment.

This varies from business to business but most business can find something that can work in the winter months. For instance a landscaping company can have a ‘prune back the trees in your garden before they become a source of winter storm damage’ while a beauty company can offer a ’beat the winter blues with a pampering facials’. See how both examples build on the idea that there things you need do in the winter months to prevent having to do more work or to make you feel better. This is the cornerstone of any good winter marketing plan, people feel lazy and have the winter blues, so anything that helps them stay lazy and feel better will always be a winner.

Build a theme that you can tie all your marketing around

his is a point that I tend to harp on but it’s an important one. If you look at the companies that constantly advertise, The Warehouse group of companies for example, they build their marketing around a theme and run with it for several promotions. A good example is the school holidays where they promote before the holidays some items to help keep the kids distracted , and at the end of the holidays the stuff that you need for when they are back at school. This can work for any business with some thought. Using our landscaping company example again, you have tree pruning to prevent storm damage, but you can also have clean guttering so they don’t get clogged by leaves and flood the roof, aerate the lawn so that doesn’t become muddy during winter, mulch/fertilize the garden to help it survive the winter months and great regrowth in spring, and so on. Each of these is a separate promotional idea but runs along the theme of preventing problems and making customers life easier in the future months.

Decide if you want to do targeted or broad marketing

Since your winter income may be limited at this time, you want to spend what marketing dollars you have effectively. For this you have to decide how you will market your business to people. In  real terms you will be spending about the same money for both methods. What it boils down to as how many people are going to respond to it. If you look at the flyers that turn up in your mailbox you will see that they are very wide in the range of specials they offer, the scattershot approach as I call it, trusting that by offering so many options that there will be high number of people will take it up. You can do that for smaller businesses too, just offer a percentage discount on a category instead of a discount on one special item. The other option is to spend the money of targeting customers who you know are more likely take up an offer of a speciality item. The easiest way of doing this is looking at the sales patterns of your existing customers and giving them offers of services that have a history of making use of. You can also do this to a degree for getting new customers. There are several mail distribution / marketing companies that have sociometric data of the population so you can request mailing lists of households that fit certain criteria based on income, family data, etc. While you do have to pay a premium for the service, it does minimise the physical marketing costs and you can make it more effective by being able to personalise it a degree.

Reconnect with your existing customers

Have clients that you haven’t seen in awhile, then why not get them to interact with you again  by giving them a ‘we miss you’ promotion. It could as broad as a simple gift voucher giving them $x to spend on anything in store (with a minimum spend requirement). If you have records of what the customer has previously spent on then use that to tailor an offer that you know they will want to take advantage of. The important thing is to get them to think about your company again and what you can do for them.

Send out some freebees

Now this one can be a bit challenging. Sending out free gifts can be expensive, not just the cost of the gift but shipping/posting it in a way that it doesn’t get damaged and arrives in a timely fashion. You can run foul of various laws depending what you send. A good way of working with this is talking to the rep’s of the company you buy supplies from and see what samples you can get from them. Often they will supply them at no or little cost and you then only have to worry about the distribution. A good example is a beauty clinic where they can get sample packs of a beauty product from a supplier and use that as part of a promotion to get people into their clinic. Even if you run a business doesn’t use a lot a products you can do some fun gift promotions to get people thinking about your services. The landscape company might send out a small packet of grass seeds with the note that the customer will have buy a lot more it if they want to have a green lawn in spring, unless they call the landscapers right now to prep their lawn.

Make use of you or your employees free time to do a ‘walk about’

A walkabout is where you have someone walk around a set of streets dropping of a promotional item or flyer to each address. The great thing about it is that you can use it as way of talking to potential customers to find out if your services will suit them and why they should use you. The best thing is that you are not ‘cold calling’ them to sell something, as that puts most people off, instead you are dropping off a gift or promo item and just chatting where in the end you can learn a lot about the ‘customer’ which will help you target your future marketing more effectively. If you have employees who are under utilised during the winter months, make do this to help them get new business, and even give them rewards for getting new clients so they do the job properly.
Naturally there are more things you can do to beat the winter sales slump and we can show you how. Just book a time with us and we can discuss options that fit your budget and time constraints, so call us at Copy Express today.