Holiday marketing and planning for your small business: Employee management, marketing, and technology

For small businesses, the holidays are the make-or-break season that can determine a year's success. That’s why you should start thinking about how to improve your holiday marketing and seasonal operations now.

As customers flock to retail stores and e-commerce sites, you’ll want to be ready to deliver quick and seamless shopping experiences. That means serving up personalized campaigns that meet people’s needs, bringing on additional staff members and resources, and optimizing your website for smoother checkouts.

If that sounds overwhelming, this guide can help. In preparation for the season, use these tips and tools to improve your holiday marketing and employee management, so you can increase sales and end the year on a high note.

Managing staff and holiday planning during busy seasons

Managing your staff is key to effective holiday planning and preparation. Whether you need to hire additional help or find ways to reduce the stress on your existing team, employee management will have an outsized impact on your ability to serve customers and generate revenue.

Here are four tactics to help you find new employees and keep them motivated during the holiday rush.

Identify staff resources

Hiring staff starts by determining the people necessary to keep operations running during the holiday season. A retailer, for instance, might hire extra customer service staff help to handle an influx of orders, returns, and shipping concerns. An e-commerce shop might hire someone to help package and ship holiday purchases. Whereas a cafe might bring on additional baristas to account for more foot traffic and prevent slowdowns in the store.

To accommodate expanded store hours or increased sales, you might consider hiring part-timers, full-timers, or contractors — or a mix of these options. If you hire contractors, for example, you won’t have to provide benefits or W-2s. Instead, contractors sign 1099s and pay taxes on their income themselves. If you use contractors, consider putting a contractor invoice process in place to ensure freelancers are as easy to pay as employees on payroll. And while you can consider hiring lower-cost talent like college or high school students, don't skimp on salaries and benefits if you want to attract more experienced employees.

It’s important to make these decisions in advance so you have the time to search, find, and train your new staff. Budgeting and planing for the holiday hiring process well ahead of the season will help you from having to scramble to fill roles and find the right talent at the last minute.

Create job listings

Once you know who you need to hire, create detailed and transparent job listings for each role. Remember to be specific when writing out each role’s eligibility requirements, responsibilities, onboarding processes, duration, and desired skills. Communicating these criteria up front can help set expectations and create a smooth and frictionless hiring process.

Writing engaging job listings can also help your ad stand out. Many businesses ramp up their hiring for the holidays. You can try to get ahead of the competition by creating attention-grabbing posts. For example, you can help your listings jump off the job boards by:

• Including relevant keywords that employees might be searching for
• Highlighting benefits such as pay range, company culture, and incentives
• Using inclusive language that welcomes applicants of all backgrounds
• Incorporating bullet points and bold text for readability
• Adding testimonials from current or past satisfied employees

With your listings done, place them on popular employment and freelance hiring sites like Monster, Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Glassdoor, LinkedIn, Upwork, and Craigslist. You might even use some of your budget to promote your job posts and target just the right talent. You can also ask current employees for recommendations and referrals, and look for talent among your friends, family, and community.

Consider incentive commission plans

Think about providing incentives to employees based on sales and profits during the holiday season. You can offer rewards or prizes for those who hit weekly sales and fulfillment targets, or consider hosting contests to keep your employees focused on your goals. Other ideas for holiday incentives and perks include:

• Commissions based on performance
• Paid time off for hitting a certain quota
• Gift cards or discounts for completing holiday training

Think about how to keep employees happy and motivated

Keeping employees happy can help alleviate the natural stress and burnout of the busy holiday season. For instance, if you're increasing headcount, make sure your staff has enough space to do their work. If necessary, rent a temporary location to hold inventory or create a production area. Business owners can also help manage employee stress by incorporating fun team-building activities, holiday events, free meals or snacks, and flexible shifts into their schedules.

Remember to establish clear communication channels and processes so employees can feel comfortable asking questions, sharing concerns, and providing feedback about their work experiences, especially during such a high-stress time.

Holiday marketing ideas

While marketing is important all year long, holiday marketing plays an especially important role in helping you achieve yearly revenue goals. Once this season rolls around, you’ll want to be ready with winning campaigns that help you stand out from the competition and boost sales.

These campaigns may include email newsletters, search results, social media channels, and traditional advertising formats. And, depending on your holiday marketing goals, they may be designed to attract new shoppers, capture more sales from loyal customers, or garner press by targeting influencers.

From personalizing ads to setting the right budget, here are key holiday marketing tips you can use to enhance your strategies.

Share holiday-themed content

Refresh your copy and visuals with holiday-themed content to promote seasonal products and encourage gift shopping. For example, you might add a downloadable gift guide to your website, publish a blog post of Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, or launch festive social media ads targeted to specific holiday shoppers. You might also create a weekly holiday email marketing newsletter, highlighting personalized products, seasonal discounts, and recommendations for last-minute shoppers.

Use personalization whenever possible

Tailor holiday ads and campaigns to meet your customers’ needs and match their unique interests and experiences. This personalized approach can help your messaging stand out from the noise and generate sales. For example, you can customize your holiday marketing strategies by reaching shoppers with:

• Personalized product suggestions based on customers’ purchase history
• Retargeting campaigns featuring products shoppers already viewed
• Email messages with abandoned cart reminders
• Post-purchase content like how-to guides and troubleshooting tips
• Targeted ads based on customers’ location, devices, and interests

Holiday marketing budget

Don't go into the holiday season without knowing what you're willing to spend. Set a detailed holiday season budget for your campaigns based on your current profits and resources, as well as past financial reports. For example, you can use last year’s profit and loss statements to predict how much revenue you might generate from this holiday season and how much you can afford to spend on marketing efforts. You can also track performance across advertising platforms to see which generate the highest engagement and returns.

Even while your holiday marketing campaigns are running, continuously track performance metrics like website traffic and conversion rates, so you can adjust your spend and get the most bang for your buck.

Optimize your website for the holidays

Website optimization is vital to holiday e-commerce planning. After all, your website is your digital storefront. It should be easy to navigate, filled with helpful information, and structured to drive purchases. That’s where these website optimization tips can help:

• Create a smooth checkout process. Eliminate purchase steps by adding clear calls to action (CTAs) throughout your site and allowing customers to auto-fill their information at checkout.
• Make sure your site is mobile-friendly. Reach mobile holiday shoppers by ensuring your site and visuals load quickly on smartphones and tablets.
• Add a holiday FAQ section. Answer customers’ questions upfront by clearly outlining your shipping and return policies, data privacy practices, and processes for filling backorders.

Search engine optimization or SEO should also be part of your e-commerce holiday planning. These SEO best practices can help you reach customers searching for their holiday-time purchases:

Include relevant keywords. Conduct keyword research to see what your target audience is searching for, and integrate relevant keywords into your landing page copy, blog content, and metadata.

• Add high-quality content. Make sure your content is informative, readable, and useful to your audience. Consider adding internal and external links to your pages, and complementing written content with visual content like videos and high-quality images.
• Consider the user experience. Optimize your user experience (UX) by ensuring your site is easy to navigate with identifiable and consistent menu options and an intuitive flow between pages.

Holiday marketing campaigns

There are many ways to create holiday marketing campaigns that increase conversions and sales. The formats and channels you choose will depend on your campaign goals and audience behaviors.

If you’re looking for some inspiration, however, here are a few campaign examples to guide your holiday marketing strategy:

• Share user-generated content on Instagram. Invite customers to tag your account with photos and videos of them using or gifting your products. Feature top submissions on your grid or Instagram Stories.
• Partner with influencers. Tap niche creators in your community to review or promote your products and offer unique discount codes to their followers.
• Launch targeted ads on Facebook. Reach your target audience by selecting certain demographics to reach out to with Facebook ads. Use these ads to drive audiences back to your site, where they can learn more about your brand and holiday offerings. Businesses should ensure they obtain legal advice on implementing these marketing strategies in compliance with privacy and consumer protection laws, as well as platform policies.

Successful holiday marketing campaigns should be planned early. Don’t wait until mid-season to start devising and launching your campaigns. Get a head start by reaching shoppers as soon as October so you can remain top-of-mind, keep customers moving through the funnel, and ultimately drive purchases.

Leveraging technology for holiday sales

Small businesses can use different apps, tools, and platforms to manage their holiday marketing efforts and customer communications. For example:

• Chatbots. Automate responses to customer service inquiries by integrating chatbots into your website and messaging platforms, saving your team valuable time.
• Integrated POS systems. Set up a point of sale (POS) system to track and manage transactions, product inventory, and customer information all in one place.
• Analytics platforms. Use platforms like Google Analytics to break down your audience by demographic and track key website metrics like clicks, unique visitors, bounce rate, and conversion rate.
• Social media management tools. Schedule, manage, and measure the response to posts across social platforms with these comprehensive solutions.

Optimizing holiday season shipping

The last thing your customers want is to find the perfect item, only to have it arrive too late, damaged, or just plain wrong. Help improve customer satisfaction and prevent a barrage of complaints and questions with these holiday shipping best practices:

• Clearly communicate your shipping and return policies so people can buy with confidence; for instance, you might offer next-day shipping or free shipping for returns.
• Confirm that you have all the tape, boxes, and packaging materials you need to keep shipments moving out the door.
• Check each product before it ships to ensure it's the right item and that it’s free from damage.
• Use an inventory management system to automatically update your stock numbers after each purchase and keep track of your available products.
• Provide customers with links to track their shipments and receive real-time notifications about any shipment updates or delays.
• Advertise your cut-off dates for holiday arrival so customers can shop accordingly; common shipping carriers like UPS, USPS, and FedEx often make their cut-off dates public as well, so you can incorporate these on your checkout page.

Optimizing payment methods

By offering multiple payment methods, you can try to reduce cart abandonment, increase brand loyalty, and capture new customers who have strong preferences about their checkout options. For example, you may want to ensure you can accept credit and debit cards, digital wallets like Apple Wallet, and cryptocurrencies. If you’re operating a brick-and-mortar location, you can also integrate contactless payment methods like tap-to-pay and QR codes into your checkout process. Contactless payments are also more convenient for customers, making it easier for them to pay.¹

Buy now, pay later solutions (BNPL) are also increasing in popularity.² With BNPL, shoppers can check out right away but pay for their purchases in installments over time. That’s why, in addition to supporting a range of preferred and contactless payment methods, PayPal offers PayPal Pay Later to help businesses reach new customers and boost sales. This BNPL option can be particularly beneficial during the holiday season, when customers may be increasing their spending and looking for opportunities to relieve some of the financial burden.

The sooner you begin planning your holiday marketing and operations, the better prepared you'll be when shoppers start making their lists and flocking to shops. Check out our holiday financial wellness playbook for all the tips and tools you need to take to make the most of the holiday season.