The End-of-Year Planning Your Business Actually Needs

It’s hard to believe we’re here... almost October!

The end of the year has a way of sneaking up on everyone, including businesses. And with it come all the dates, promotions, events, sales and tasks that make the holiday season feel especially busy. There’s more competing for your customers’ attention, more opportunities to market your business and, if you aren’t careful, a whole lot more added to your plate.

But preparing for the holidays doesn’t necessarily mean doing more. It means deciding ahead of time what actually matters to your business and making a plan for it.

We’ve all heard the phrase “work smarter, not harder,” and this is the time for it. You already know many of the dates that are coming: Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday, shipping deadlines, Christmas and everything in between. You don’t have to participate in all of them. You just need to know what’s coming, decide where you want to focus your efforts and give yourself enough time to prepare.

You’re probably going to market your business during the holidays anyway. Why not make a plan that allows you to do it more efficiently, while still leaving room for all the other things that matter this time of year?

End-of-Year Business Planning: Where to Start

1. Know Your Dates

You don’t have to participate in every holiday or sale that comes along. In fact, depending on your business, you may be better off choosing just a few that actually make sense for you.

Let’s say you own a candle business and decide Small Business Saturday is going to be your big holiday promotion. Instead of scrambling to create something for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and every other shopping day, you can put your energy into making that one promotion count.

And because you decided ahead of time, you can start talking about it before Small Business Saturday. Your social media, email marketing and even printed materials, where appropriate, can all let customers know when to shop and what to expect.

Now you aren’t wasting time creating extra content just because everyone else is. You know exactly where your focus needs to be, and you can plan accordingly.

2. Check What Your Customers See

Once you know what you’re promoting, take a look at your business from your customer’s perspective.

Is your website current? Are your products and services up to date? Are upcoming promotions easy to find? If our candle business has three new holiday scents but none of them are on the website yet, all the marketing in the world isn’t going to help customers buy something they can’t find.

This is also a good time to pay attention to where customers are finding you. If most of your sales come through social media, but you’re putting the majority of your effort somewhere your customers rarely engage, that’s worth knowing. It doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning another marketing channel. It means understanding what’s working so you can make intentional decisions about where your time and energy go.

Before you focus on getting more eyes on your business, make sure what they’re going to see is ready for them.

3. Clarify What You’re Saying

The holiday season is already noisy. Your marketing doesn’t need to add to it.

Customers should be able to move between your social media, emails and website without getting a different message everywhere they go.

Back to our candle business. If social media is promoting the new holiday scents, emails are focused on room spray and the website doesn’t mention the holiday collection at all, what is the customer actually supposed to pay attention to?

Your marketing channels don’t need to say exactly the same thing, but they should support the same overall message. Keep your promotion, language and imagery cohesive so customers can quickly understand what you’re offering and what you want them to do next.

4. Follow the Entire Journey

Finally, walk through the experience yourself.

Pretend you’re a customer who has never interacted with your business before. Find the social media post. Click the link. Visit the website. Read the product description. Add something to your cart. Go through checkout. Read the confirmation email.

Does everything work? Is the information consistent? Is it obvious what to do next? And just as importantly, what happens after someone makes the purchase?

Walking through the entire customer journey is one of the easiest ways to uncover gaps you may not notice when you’re looking at your business from the inside.

Prepare With Purpose

End of year business planning doesn’t mean participating in every holiday, running more promotions or creating more content.

It means knowing what’s coming, deciding what deserves your attention and making sure the pieces of your business support what you’re trying to accomplish.

A little preparation now can mean fewer last-minute posts, fewer rushed decisions and less time trying to figure things out in the middle of an already busy season.

And if you know what you want to do before the end of the year but pulling all of those pieces together is the hard part, that’s exactly the kind of work I love helping small businesses with at Wild Marketing.