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Most seasonal shopping is conducted online. Black Friday alone can add up to over a whopping five billion dollars in online sales! Whether a seasonal retailer has a physical location, an online storefront, or both, they can stand to expand in several ways.
Having a seasonal retail business could be quite risky, but also highly lucrative if you go about it in the right manner. Most such businesses look forward to the holidays as their peak time of the year. If they don’t make enough profits even during season, they may stand several losses and even close down.
Some businesses go the other way and make all their profits in one go!
Yet others expand their sales volume, revenue, and profits every single year. That’s by far the best result of the holiday season.
Want to know how they do it?
Here’s how seasonal retail businesses could expand even when their sales are fluctuating up and down all year round.
Get a Remarketing Plan Ready
Smart retail companies focus not just on physical locations, but also try to bring in more business with their online storefronts. They take advantage of the buildup before the holidays to get more insight into their target market. When the holiday season begins, they have a huge market all ready for to start targeting with their remarketing strategy.
Practically speaking, don’t wait until Black Friday is looming to start your marketing campaign. Concentrate on making your product a familiar sight in the weeks or even months leading up to that time of the year. You can also find an e-commerce solution: get an online storefront to complement your physical shop.
When potential buyers are more familiar with your product, they’ll be more motivated to purchase it when the season starts. In fact, your offering would probably be on their shopping lists and wishlists before anyone even begins shopping for the season.
Know Your Region
You should be strongly aware of whatever is going on in the locality where you sell. Even if your product is distributed over a wide region, your marketing should be somewhat reflective of what the people there care about.
One example could be of a gift shop near the beach. You can sell some really strong sunblock that is not available anywhere else. Alternatively, you could take advantage of a sports event coming up in your town and package your goods accordingly.
By adopting these practices, you’ll be able to set your output apart from the masses of goods available in the market. The tweaks don’t have to be expensive ones; as long as they speak to the locals, that’s usually all you need.
Pursue Your Target Audience
Don’t wait for your customers to come to you; get to them first. This is the age of millennials, where the strongest and most influential customers are looking for a way to save time and effort. If you become the retailer that goes out of their way to save their time, you may become the most coveted business in town.
When you adopt such methods, you can even be a serious contender to online offerings. In order to achieve this goal, try and predict the needs of your target customers. This way, you can catch them at the best time and fulfill whatever they want before any of your competitors do.
One example of such a business is a shop that sells sweets and chocolates. Such a business could send out staff in or near the holiday season to take orders from potential customers. Even if a customer was planning to go out and buy a packet of chocolates from some other place, they’ll seriously consider the service that comes to their very door.
No Monotony Allowed
Potential customers are all too likely to get bored if all the advertisements and marketing strategies are the same during the holiday season. This is why one should strive to stand out from the usual colors, designs, and campaigns that their competitors use during the peak season.
Seasonal promotions don’t always have to be the same the year round. One could open up a Halloween kiosk every year and make it a bit different each time. One year, they may focus on selling pumpkin spice flavored food items. The next year, they might advertise vegan and allergen-free treats for handing out to trick-or-treaters.
This is the sort of development that may even take you above and beyond ecommerce. Retailers operating online can easily tweak their websites to reflect the coming season. If physical retailers delve into web development wisely, they may be able to take advantage of their instant service.
Spend on Media and Get Your Return
A lot of retailers are highly generous with the advertising budgets come holiday season. The major stories like Tesco and Wal-Mart could even spend up to billions of dollars of advertising around Christmas time. This also means that advertising is going to be very expensive around this time.
You have to make sure you get the right amount of high return from the amount you spend on marketing when the time is right. For this, research is extremely important so that you can pinpoint your targets and work on the most effective way to achieve them.
Advertising companies are increasing in number but declining in effect, so make sure you pick the one that can make you stand out.
Get an Event Together
You should also reserve a part of your budget for holding events if possible. This will bring a lot of traffic to all your stores – both online and physical. Events can also be streamed live online and have their own hashtags. This will get your business a high level of free advertising that will reach huge consumer groups.
One example of an event is a home décor store holding a DIY repairs workshop for their female customers. They could thus attract attention towards women empowerment along with greatly improving their sales. Their brand will also get a high rate of development and become familiar to the target market.
