Are you looking for Christmas marketing ideas? It can feel especially noisy online at this time of year with every product business trying to boost sales before the 25th December.

There is definitely room for sales posts reminding people what you have to sell, but it can also be a great time to start summarising what happened this year, and reminding people you'll be available in the new year.

In this short blog I'll give you a few suggestions to showcase your products and services in the run up to Christmas.

5 Ideas for Service Business Owners

1. Send a company e-card Thanking customers for their support of your business during the last 12 months is a great idea to stand out from the crowd. It is also the most environmentally friendly sort of card to send. After doing a quick search Moonpig offers e-cards from 99p

2. Email campaigns with early bird offers

If you've got courses launching in January, why not offer your most loyal customers the chance to book in early? It makes for another good reason to be on your email list as well.

3. Create best 5 roundups to post on social media/your blog

Remind people what they loved about you this year by rounding up your best content and repackaging it into top 5 posts. Not everyone will have seen your content during the year because everyone is busy and sees things at different times, and you are likely to have attracted new people during the year.

4. Create a trends report for the coming year

Everyone wants to know what to expect in terms of trends. There are some great reports from social media tools like Pinterest where they share what people have been searching on over the past months, creating useful insights for customers in those fields. You could create a bespoke report for the fields your top clients work in, and email it to them as a useful heads up.

5. Film a year end wrap up video with other industry experts

If you love going live on social media then finding another service owner to chat to about what the year has meant from a marketing point of view could be really useful to your customers. If you prefer not to do live then you could record a video for YouTube or StreamYard

5 Ideas for Product Business Owners

1. Calendar Countdowns of your best products

There is still time to create a Christmas countdown where you showcase a product per day on social media. Be sure to tag in the brand you are highlighting so they can share your posts too.

2. Sponsor a local school's fair

Schools are always trying to fund raise and often offer local businesses the chance to be the main sponsor of their events. Get your business name in front of hundreds of local parents in one go, and generate good will to last the whole year.

3. Create a virtual Christmas calendar with other small business owners

I've joined in before with a local business calendar on social media. Each day 1 door opens, the participating business tells everyone what their prize is that day, you can enter by commenting on the post, and the other participating business owners advertise who is door number X each day. It means working with 23 other small businesses and generating new leads for each other throughout the month.

4. Offer To Gift Wrap Your Products

Everyone is trying to save time over the holidays, and a company offering a nicely wrapped gift, instead of just the product, will be seen as useful, and worth the extra charge if there is one.

5. Offer Gift Cards

This is not a new idea of course, but lots of small businesses don't do this. Gift cards are a brilliant way of helping customers to choose the amount they want to spend on their friends and family, and until they are cashed also give your cashflow a boost. Figures vary but I have seen it suggested that up to 20% of gift cards are never cashed.

I hope these ten marketing ideas have given you at least one or two useful suggestions to go and boost your Christmas marketing efforts whether you are a product business or a service provider. If all else fails you can share some Michael Buble' Christmas tunes on your social media.

Thanks for reading.

Shona

P.S If you would like to receive blogs like this straight to your inbox you can sign up here for my mailing list. I mail once per week on a Friday.

For even more low cost marketing ideas why not buy my book?

If you would like even more low cost marketing ideas I wrote a book. 100 Marketing Tips for Small Business Owners. Check it out here

About Me

Shona Chambers Marketing is a Marketing Consultancy based in SE London.

Specialising in helping Small Business Owners and Freelancers with their Marketing.