It’s easy to find holiday marketing tips for eCommerce businesses. There are all kinds of ways to repackage or bring awareness to products, but for business services, it gets a bit more tricky. After all, what you have to offer isn’t something you can simply hand someone – so what should organizations that offer services do?
In this article, we’ll provide some excellent tips on how business services can approach Christmas marketing. Read on to learn more!
1. Give Back Through a Christmas Donation Program
In our most recent article, we talked about social responsibility , so it’s only fitting that a Christmas donation program would make it to the top of our list. By donating your time, money, or services to a local drive campaign, you can raise awareness of your brand while doing good in the community and networking with other businesses.
You can even offer discounts or certificates to volunteers who are helping out!
Here are some of the donation programs you can help with:
- Food drives
- Toy drives
- Clothing drives
- Online charity campaigns
Be sure to include relevant info about the project in your advertisement, including:
- Who/where the donation is going
- What to donate and where
- Whether people can donate money instead of items
2. Host a Fun, Holiday-Themed Contest on Social
Everyone loves a good contest, especially if the reward is appealing. If you’re a service-based organization, it can be a bit trickier to figure out what to give away, but here are some ideas:
- Branded merch (but only if you’re sure your follower base will want it)
- A steeply discounted service
- Offer one of the easier services for free
- A gift basket full of goodies (with a gift certificate for your business)
Get creative about your specific service and think about what you can do. For example, a business consulting or branding service can offer to review your LinkedIn profile and offer pointers for improvement.
You’ll want your contest to be sharable, so be sure to create a specific hashtag so you can follow it easily, without missing an entry. Host a “Guess how many” game by taking a decorated jar, holiday mug, or stocking and filling it with candy for followers to guess. Some other ideas:
- Ugly Christmas sweater contest
- Design contest
- Cookie decorating contest (you can’t eat them, but you can see them)
- Christmas carol contest
If you want to run other types of promos on social, consider Christmas giveaways or a “12 days of Christmas” promotion, each offering a discount on a different service.
3. Send Special Emails to Loyal Customers
Use your CRM or other customer data to send a targeted holiday email with a special discount just for the customer using dynamic content. By offering a personalized discount, you help your client feel valued, incentivize further purchases, and strengthen client relationships.
4. Team Up with Another Great Business
If your services are often used in conjunction with another type of service, you can team up with another business to offer a bundle deal over the holidays. For example, an HVAC company might approach a plumbing service to create a “home services bundle.” A marketing agency could team up with an analytics company so their clients can continue to monitor growth.
5. Offer a Flash Sale of Your Service
You can send an email marketing series with different flash sales, or even send texts about your flash sales. Since text message open rates are much higher than email open rates (Over 98% compared to 20%), this could be a great way to get repeat customers.
6. Make Your Online Presence More Jolly
Everything about your online presence should reflect the festivity of the season. Here are some ideas:
- Add holiday-related content to your social media accounts
- Bring Christmas cheer to your website by adding festive characters
- Consider building a mobile app to help people through the holiday season
- Create a landing page for a special “Christmas gift” promo
- Film yourself at a local Christmas lighting or event, and post it to your social accounts
7. Participate in Small Business Saturday
The Saturday after Thanksgiving (November 26) is “Small Business Saturday.” Check in with your chamber of commerce to see how you can participate in the event and promote your business.
8. Stand Out with Printed Christmas Cards
Many businesses use digital means to connect with their customers now. While there’s nothing wrong with that, the widespread shift to digitization means that physical mail has become much more meaningful. Choose cards that reflect your company’s personality and tastes, and your customers will love the personal touch of having cards mailed to them.
Market Your Services Better with Matcha
Writing this post has gotten our creative juices flowing, and we’d love to help you with your marketing goals where we can! We can help by changing up your website, creating custom social media posts for your business, and designing and printing special Christmas cards that will be unlike anything your clients have seen.
Want to learn more about how Matcha can transform your marketing strategy? Sign up for a demo here!
