8 Steps to Get Ready for the Holiday Retail Season

8 Steps to Get Ready for the Holiday Retail Season
72 Percent of Twitter Followers Are More Likely to Buy From You
Facebook Opens Embedded Posts to All Websites
How to Leverage Infographics for B2B Marketing

Posted: 22 Aug 2013 02:00 PM PDT

holiday retail

Smart retailers are already thinking ahead to Thanksgiving Day, the official kickoff of the holiday retail shopping season, and how to prepare for a successful year.

If you own a brick-and-mortar store, preparing early is more important than ever, in order to compete with online retailers and their 24/7 storefronts. Plus, this year there are only 26 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas, six fewer than last year, cutting almost a week out of the core holiday shopping season.

Prepare for Holiday Retail Season of 2013

How can you get ready to squeeze the most possible sales out of holiday 2013? You can start with the tips below.

Get the Skinny on Your Industry's Trends

Peruse your industry publications and websites to get experts' insights on what products are likely to be hot sellers this year so you can make sure you have an ample supply. Hit gift-oriented trade shows too. You can find relevant shows for your industry at TSNN.com.

Tap Into What Customers are Talking About

While holiday shopping probably isn't a hot topic on most consumers' minds just yet, keep an eye on social media to see what's bubbling up. In particular, Pinterest can be a great resource to see what customers are craving.

Track the Pinterest users that follow your business (or your competitors) on Pinterest. Watch what they're pinning and who else they follow. This can help you spot trends. You can also start holiday themed Pinterest boards and ask your followers to share what they hope to give and/or get this year.

This is a great way to localize the bigger trends you learn about in #1.

Focus on Your Loyal Customers

How will you make sure your best customers visit your store more than once? Reach out to them early in the season (or even before the season).

For example, invite your best customers to a special shopping night before Thanksgiving to offer a more stress-free shopping experience.

Perfect Your Local Presence

Customers went mobile-mad last year, using their smartphones like never before to research products, compare prices and find stores.

Make sure your business is listed on local search directories like Local.com or Google+ Local and that your listings are updated and optimized with things customers want to know. Things like driving directions, store hours and a phone number.

Watch Your Reviews

When customers find you on a search site, they might also see ratings of your store. If you've got two stars while your competitor has four, guess who's going to get the business?

Pay special attention to online reviews of your store this time of year. If any negative feedback has driven your ratings down, deal with it now so your score rises before the holiday shopping season starts in earnest.

Review Last Year's Holiday Marketing Plan

What did you do last year? What worked and what didn't? Did certain marketing activities attract the type of customers you want more of this year?

Figure out what you should do more of and less of this time around.

Create a Calendar

One of the biggest mistakes small retailers make with marketing is planning at the last-minute. Then they can't accomplish their goals.

Take some time to think ahead about all the marketing activities you want to carry out this holiday season. Whether it's an email campaign, special in-store events or some blowout sale days, mark the dates on your calendar and plan backward from there.

This ensures you aren't scrambling at the last minute to find a party rental company or caterer, merchandise the store for the big sale day or get adequate gift wrap supplies on hand.

Time it Right

For small retailers, the line between when customers like to shop and when they get offended at seeing holiday décor in the stores is a blurry one. The National Retail Federation reports that every year, about 40 percent of consumers begin their holiday shopping before Halloween, and more retailers are beginning to put decorations and greeting cards on the shelves in September.

If you'd rather wait until after Halloween to start decking the halls, consider offering a "secret" early holiday sale only to loyal customers, or advertising it via direct mail or email so customers who are interested can participate.

Holiday Photo via Shutterstock

The post 8 Steps to Get Ready for the Holiday Retail Season appeared first on Small Business Trends.

72 Percent of Twitter Followers Are More Likely to Buy From You

Posted: 22 Aug 2013 11:45 AM PDT

You’ve probably used Twitter as a professional networking and marketing tool. But you may wonder whether Twitter actually leads to more sales.

It turns out a recent survey by Market Probe International answers that question.

Conducted on behalf of Twitter, the research firm surveyed 500 people over the age of 18 in the US and the UK who regularly follow small to medium sized businesses on Twitter.

Results were published on the official Twitter advertising blog today.

The upshot of the survey is that Twitter can have an impact on small businesses — and that getting Twitter followers matters. And in fact, Twitter set up the hashtag #FollowersMatter, to emphasize those results.

Getting ROI From Twitter

If you're looking for ROI from your social media efforts, there are some impressive statistics coming out of this study (illustrated in the infographic below):

The survey shows Twitter can influence purchase decisions. According to the survey, 72 percent of those who follow a business are more likely to make a purchase afterward from that business. If that holds true across the board, that means your followers are likely to turn into paying customers, if they are not already.
Not only that, but 82 percent of followers are more likely to recommend your product or service to friends and family. That means, Twitter has a positive impact on and can amplify word of mouth.
Twitter can lead more loyal customers. For instance, 85 percent say they feel a closer connection to the SMB after they follow them.

Clues for Getting More Twitter Followers

If you’re trying to figure out how to get more followers for your business on Twitter, the survey has some clues. Look at WHY people follow small businesses on Twitter. If you know what they are looking for from you, you know what kind of information to give them through your Twitter feed:

The majority of those responding, 73 percent, said they followed SMB brands on Twitter primarily to get updates on a company’s future products. Based on that,you should be tweeting about new product launches, executive presentations that are public and discuss the company's future direction, special offers to try new products, and similar information.
63 percent said they followed brands primarily to show their support. When you think about that, it's important for small businesses to get support. Small businesses don't have the same resources for market research are large corporations, and don't always know if they are hitting the mark with customers and potential customers — or what they may need to change.
Customers want to interact and engage with small businesses. 61 percent of those surveyed said they followed businesses not to receive information but to give feedback and communicate.

Twitter has a small business handle at @TwitterSmallBiz to follow. For more information about using Twitter for small business read more Twitter tips and advice from Small Business Trends.

[Click for the full infographic]

The post 72 Percent of Twitter Followers Are More Likely to Buy From You appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Facebook Opens Embedded Posts to All Websites

Posted: 22 Aug 2013 07:30 AM PDT

If you regularly embed Twitter posts to your blog or website to highlight a customer comment or for any number of reason, now you can do the same with Facebook.

Introducing the continued roll out of Facebook embedded posts on the official Facebook developers blog, Facebook software engineer Dave Capra explained on Wednesday:

We introduced Embedded Posts in July to make it easy for publishers to add any public post from Facebook to their blog or web site. Today, we’re excited to make Embedded Posts available to everyone. We’ve also added several enhancements based on feedback from our launch partners.

Installing Facebook posts is easy. Simply hover your cursor over the arrow in the upper right hand corner of the post you want on Facebook. Then select the embed option.

Basic Features of Facebook Embedded Posts

It’s inevitable that the new feature will be compared to the embed tweet function on Twitter. However, there are some interesting differences.

First, video players in the Facebook posts will play on your site as well, once you’ve embedded the post. It’s a nifty option if you want to add things like customer testimonials shared on Facebook to your main site.

Second, you can access the embed code right from the post on your blog or website. Do this by using the pull down next to the “Like Page” or “Follow” button on the new embedded post. This could be a way of giving your posts more shelf-life, since readers would have another place to find and share them besides your Facebook feed.

Third, there’s a special size to accommodate the smaller screen of a mobile device, very important with increased smartphone and tablet use these days.

There’s even a special plugin to help WordPress publishers use the embed feature more easily.

The post Facebook Opens Embedded Posts to All Websites appeared first on Small Business Trends.

How to Leverage Infographics for B2B Marketing

Posted: 22 Aug 2013 04:30 AM PDT

infographics for B2B marketing

Infographics are a popular topic (and sometimes target) for discussion amongst anyone doing online marketing. A sharp uptick in the volume of infographics being created has made getting your graphic “heard above the noise” more difficult. But infographics can still be an extremely effective tactic for generating awareness, communicating a story and getting traffic and earned links.

One challenge some folks run into with infographics and data visualizations (not unlike most types of content) is that they view their industry or area of focus as “too boring” to generate relevant ideas for infographics that will also get traction socially and with bloggers. After all, to make it a success you need to generate that attention, traffic, and earned links. This is a particularly popular objection with companies considering developing and promoting infographics for B2B marketing.

There are a lot of different ways to generate shareworthy content ideas for your niche. Businesses are generating interesting data visualizations all the time. So we’ll talk specifically about some methods for developing ideas for B2B focused infographics, with examples.

Tie Your B2B Infographic to a Timely Industry Hook

One important thing to keep in mind in creating infographics (or other types of content as well, for that matter) is that if you think hard enough about your niche, you can likely come up with an angle that bloggers and press will be interested in.

Look at content that’s created in publications related to what you do. What types of events and news stories are they regularly focusing coverage on? What kind of interesting data visualization can you create that will add to that coverage and discussion?

Quarterly Earnings or Annual Holidays

WordStream (my former employer) created an infographic titled how Google makes its money. They created another on the industries contributing to Google’s revenue, which performed very well. Both were launched right after Google released their quarterly earnings report. The tech and business press are always looking for information and additional angles to talk about earning reports from big companies. So the timing of the graphic’s release helped in both cases.

The nice thing about events like quarterly earnings is that they’re inevitable (they happen every quarter). So you can plan for them and have the graphic ready to launch as they come up.

Noteworthy News Events

These can be a little trickier because you have to time them specifically with a news event (and frequently you have to get a little lucky regarding when you get the graphic out, as you may be dependent on the shelf life of the story). But if you get it right, you can really have the graphic pop.

Veracode, a Web application security company, released this infographic on Twitter hacks the week of a prominent Twitter hack of USA Today’s account. As a result, the site received links and mentions from prominent sites like Mashable and ReadWrite.

"Explainer" Graphics & How-Tos

Like with any content, if you can cover the key points surrounding a central concept that many people in your niche may be interested in and/or confused by, or if you can explain how to execute on something, people will be willing to share what you’ve created. There are a number of tactics you can take in creating explainer and how-to infographics for B2B, including:

Offer definitions to commonly used terms and outline the current configuration of your industry, including key players, etc. Be careful not to be overly self-aggrandizing.
Find a salacious related field / topic to yours and go into depth on it.
Offer a simple, easy to understand statistical breakdown of an existing problem. Sometimes these are the easiest to share.
You can also leverage expertise for an interesting graphic that explains a topic. If you’re a designer, creating a graphic on use of fonts and colors is a pretty obvious example. But if you’re a trade show company with some expertise on what catches people’s attention, that can make for an interesting graphic as well.

Graphics Aimed at a Specific Niche of Likely Sharers

Certain niches just share content more. With infographics, you’re typically looking for a topic that will be interesting to bloggers and social sharers.

So think about how you might relate your topic back to topics like tech, social media or just passionate folks who blog frequently. Example: parents or folks interested in green living.

Maybe you can look at the effects of a popular topic such as the overall impact of your industry in a way your readers, and bloggers and sharers, will find interesting.

You Can Create a Compelling Infographic – But Maybe You Shouldn’t

Regardless of how “boring” you think your B2B product or service may be, you can certainly come up with an idea for a compelling graphic. If you focus on coming up with a topic that bloggers are likely to want to write about and sharers are likely to share, you’ll even have a strong chance of creating a successful graphic.

That still doesn’t necessarily mean infographics are for you, though.

Good infographics are expensive. They have to be researched, designed and promoted. Even very well thought-out graphics can totally flop and fail to generate much in the way of conversation, links and shares. So if you own a small business and designing a single graphic eats up so much of your budget that you absolutely have to have them be a success, you should probably be leveraging other tactics.

With any content marketing activities where you’re creating something and then relying on others to link to it, you really need to take a “portfolio” approach to content creation and promotion. Some of your efforts will fail. Some will be better than you thought. In aggregate, they should provide the returns you’re expecting for the total cost you’re laying out.

If you can’t afford to do them more than once, there’s a strong chance you should be picking another tactic instead.

Infograph Photo via Shutterstock

The post How to Leverage Infographics for B2B Marketing appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Small Business Trends

Friday, August 23, 2013