The holiday season is the busiest and most exciting time for many small businesses, especially in industries like garments and personalized products. But whenever your busy season is, the flood of orders comes with many challenges such as balancing inventory, shipping, customer service, and marketing. It’s an exhilarating but tricky time. Your busy seasons can quickly become a nightmare of missed deadlines, stressed-out customers, employees, and owners, as well as lost opportunities if you’re unprepared.
But don’t worry — you’re not alone. Marketing during the holiday rush doesn’t have to feel like a burden. With the right strategies in place, you can implement, evaluate, and adjust to make the most of your busy season. With these five key strategies to navigate this period, you can ensure your marketing efforts are successful, your customers are happy, and you keep your sanity intact.
1. Mindset matters
When the busy season ramps up (you might even be in the thick of it now), it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. You’ve got so much coming at you that it can be hard to know what direction to go. That’s why mindset matters now more than ever. The most crucial mindset to master is to trust your instincts. You’ve built your business on knowing your customers, your product, and your market. During this time, lean into that trust.
One of the biggest mindset shifts you can make is letting go of what you think people want to hear. Forget about trying to craft the perfect message to appeal to everyone. Do the best with what available time you have and don’t let up on sharing about your business. Focus on staying authentic. When you speak directly to your ideal customers, the ones who already value what you do, you’re going to have a much bigger impact than if you try to please the masses.
And here’s a little secret: don’t be afraid to ask yourself “why” when you feel uncertain. Why are you focusing on a specific strategy? Why are you using certain messaging? And, most importantly, why are you sharing your business to begin with? You are providing a valuable service that people need and you can’t hide it from them. The more you dig into the “why” questions, the more clarity and confidence you’ll find, even in the middle of chaos.
2. Action over perfection
Once you start trusting your instincts, you will start sharing more, and that is important even during your busy time. You need to keep the momentum rolling so that when you slow down after your busy season, the business doesn’t come to a complete stop. And as you start sharing more, as a proud business owner or marketing manager, the tendency will be to make our marketing perfect. But during the busy rush, aiming for perfection can lead to paralysis. The key is action — taking steps forward, no matter how small. Think of it like riding a bike. If you’re not moving, it’s hard to stay balanced. But once you start pedaling, even slowly, things get easier. The same applies to marketing: the more action you take, the more momentum you’ll build.
Start by breaking down your big tasks into smaller, manageable steps. For example, if one of your goals is to launch a new campaign on social media, don’t think of it as one giant task. Break it into mini tasks like designing a post, writing the copy, scheduling the post, and engaging with comments.
The beauty of these small steps is that they add up quickly. By focusing on what you can do today, you’ll find that the momentum from these actions carries you through the busy season. Plus, once you start moving, it becomes much easier to adjust and tweak your strategies based on what’s working and what’s not.
3. Measuring what matters
During the busy season, you don’t have time to waste on vanity metrics. Those metrics that make us feel good, but don’t ultimately have an impact on what matters as they cannot be correlated back to your goals. Likes, followers, and video views are nice, but they don’t always tell you the full story. What you need to focus on are actionable metrics — the ones that help you make informed decisions and move your business forward.
So, what should you be measuring? Here are a few key performance indicators to keep an eye on:
- Social media engagement: Look at meaningful interactions like comments, shares, and clicks. These actions show that your audience is interested and engaged. It is the action that most closely resembles someone raising their hand and saying, “I’m interested” on social media.
- Email click-throughs: Many times, when people talk about email the open rate seems to be the most talked about, but what you need to see is the number and location of people clicking on your call-to-actions. Email open rates will not tell you much because the email system some people use still shows an open even if they just deleted it, and some don’t show the images on an email and people might still read them and click on a link.
- Conversions: Track how many visitors to your website are taking the next step — whether that’s making a purchase or signing up for a service. This is one of the most critical metrics for measuring the success of your marketing. When looking at this, look for the path they took to get there and that will allow you to focus on amplifying what is working, instead of just trying different things.
By focusing on these actionable metrics, you can quickly adjust your efforts to maximize results. And remember, every action you take will either get you closer to your goals or teach you something valuable for next time. Keep evaluating and refining.
4. Stay organized
We’ve all been there — trying to juggle too many things at once, especially during our busy season. Marketing can feel like it’s just one more thing on an already overflowing to-do list. Enter time blocking!
Time blocking is about setting aside specific chunks of time for your marketing and other important tasks that can easily get pushed aside in the daily firefight that can transpire. Instead of jumping aimlessly between tasks, you assign each one its own time slot as an appointment with yourself.
Be realistic about your time blocks. As little as 30-minute chunks will make a huge difference when you are focusing on high-value tasks. You can take the time block a step further and implement the Pomodoro technique where you work for 25 minutes completely focused and undistracted, then take a 5-minute break. And remember to leave some buffer space for interruptions or unexpected issues (because, let’s face it, things will come up).
5. Evaluate & adjust
As you know, your busy season is fast-paced and things can change in an instant. That’s why it’s crucial to regularly evaluate your efforts and adjust as needed. Flexibility is key. Set aside time — at least weekly — to review your metrics and evaluate what’s working. This is where self-audits come in handy. The goal here is to take what you’ve learned and make real-time adjustments. Maybe you need to tweak your messaging, focus more on a particular channel, or even shift your offer slightly.
A few questions to guide your evaluation:
- What business decisions can I make with this data?
- How can I replicate the successes I’m seeing?
- Is this metric a true reflection of what’s happening in my business?
By continuously evaluating and adjusting your strategies, you’ll be able to stay ahead of the game — even when things get hectic.
Marketing during your rush is no easy feat, but with the right strategies, you can thrive instead of just survive. Remember, the five keys to marketing success are:
- Trust your instincts and stay authentic.
- Take action — even small steps build momentum.
- Measure what matters and track actionable metrics.
- Use time blocking to stay organized and focused.
- Evaluate and adjust as you go.
As you navigate this year’s busy season, keep in mind that the key to company’s success is to understand that business is a continuous cycle of action, evaluation, and adjustment. The more you practice these skills now, the better equipped you’ll be to handle future challenges and the more you’ll continue to grow your business. You’ve got this!
