For B2C companies, the approach to holiday marketing can be pretty straightforward: liven up your image with Christmas cheer, launch anticipated new products, and offer older merchandise at discounted prices. Competitors will engage in similar tactics, and it becomes a horse race for sales through mid-January. For B2B companies, how to best use their end-of-year marketing budget can often raise a few questions. Many businesses wonder if they should invest any time, money, or effort at all in outbound marketing during this season or if they should shift their focus entirely towards planning for the following year.
The answer lies somewhere in the middle, so here are 5 professional tips for end-of-year B2B Holiday Marketing:
1. Get in the Holiday Spirit
It may seem overstated but, even if you don’t have an airtight marketing strategy for the holidays, you should still tweak your company’s image to fit the season. It’s not so much about how much this can influence your bottom line, but rather about avoiding seeming apathetic to the holidays as a brand; nobody likes a Grinch. Whether it’s Christmas, Hanukkah, or Kwanza, dress your brand with the holiday spirit, send out seasonal greetings, and show a merrier side to your business.
2. Engage in social listening
If outbound marketing will take a step back during the end of the year, then it’s a smart move to use some of your marketing budget for research, planning, and strategizing. With all the social media activity going on from competitors, partners, clients, and end-users, there is a lot of valuable data and insight that can be harvested for your benefit. Pay attention to customer/end-user feedback on your and your competitors’ social media channels, study trends, and engage in direct communication with customers asking questions. What are people complaining or praising about your competition? Can you do better than them at that specific issue? What unsatisfied business needs are people discussing online? Listen, analyze, strategize, and capitalize on your findings for the new year.
3. Market to your B2C customers
Your company may not be experiencing a sales boom in Q4, but it’s likely that many of your customers are. Your clients that are B2C businesses (especially those in retail) will be happy to have increased sales during the holidays. Still, many of them may be experiencing issues associated with having more sales and orders to process. Some of them may even be going through permanent growth during the season and need to act fast to adapt correctly. Find out which issues affect B2C customers during the holidays and market your solutions to these specific issues. If there’s an approach that can help your end-of-year B2B sales, it will be helping B2C companies manage theirs.
4. Consider running your own Holiday promotion
While the “Holiday promo” won’t work for every business, if you do find yourself with a good list of potential or existing B2C customers that need help during the holidays, then try to find a good promotion or package that you can market specifically to them. Our best advice? Look to your mailing list and prioritize an email marketing campaign for warm leads over trying to fight for an advertising spot on Google since advertising costs tend to increase towards the end of the year.
5. Peform Strategic Outreach
As a B2B company, we can safely say that most people in our line of business (decision-makers included) work through the holidays, often taking just a few days off towards the end of the month. It’s important to let your clients know that you are available and open to listening to them about their business needs and how you can help them achieve their goals for the next year. Reach out and connect with your existing or past customers, not with an outright sales pitch but rather with an exploratory and empathetic message to let them know you want to find out different ways to help their business. If you’re not making sales, you could focus on warming up leads for Q1 2022.
We hope these tips are helpful and would like to wish all our readers Happy Holidays! If you want to discuss your marketing strategy, feel free to contact us.
