In preparing for Small Business Saturday 2015, the important thing to remember is “Shop Small”. This basically means that you are going to support your locally owned businesses, whether it is online or offline. This event has been annually sponsored by American Express since 2010. On the homepage for the event, you can actually search by your zip code to find local businesses that you can support.
In the image below, you can see the impact of ShopSmall and how you can help on Small Business Saturday which is November 28, 2015. It’s the Saturday after Thanksgiving (US). As you can see, it explains the process in how you can play a part in supporting your local small business owners. Whether you are hired by them, chose to become a customer or even decide to become a vendor, your support is very important to the Shop Small Movement.
3 Tips To Get Prepared For Small Business Saturday
If you are a small business, there are basically three powerful tips that can help you get prepared for Small Business Saturday. They are doing a website readiness check, creating branded marketing and crafting social media message. Let’s take a deeper look into these three tips so that you can quickly learn how to implement them.
Complete a Website Readiness Checklist. It can assist you in making sure your website is ready and can handle your target customers. Click here to check for Readiness. When you complete the readiness test, make a plan to incorporate the things that may be missing according to the checklist to your website.
Once you start implementing the plan, test your changes to see if how they are working out. Modify things if you need to, just so you can make sure your website is ready for your target customers.
Create branded marketing. When you create these messages, make sure that they sync up with the purpose of your business. This includes website content/look/feel, graphic images, mission, vision and more. According to Entrepreneur.com, there are 3 Steps to Creating Your Branding Message.
- The customer perspective: Don’t presume. Interview customers, survey them, pay attention to them on social media.
- The internal perspective: For a brand promise to be effective it must be true.
- The marketplace perspective: Only one brand can own a position. How do your competitors position themselves? Look at their tag lines.
Craft branded social media messages. To do this, make sure that your messages encourage your target customers to take action on buying your products or services. Use power words that connect with your target customer on an emotional and financial level.
When you use power words in your social media messages, it could encourage your target customers to take action. A few power words to consider are:
- Free
- Sale
- New
- Valuable
- Ultimate
- Affordable
- Outstanding
- Timely
- Simple
- Last Minute
So for Small Business Saturday, a combination of the power words can be put together to create social media message. See the sample message below:
Just in time for Small Business Saturday, get in on our timely surprise sale for our excellent services. To learn more, visit [insert URL here].
This is a generic message that could be used, however you can see that it includes several power words that could entice your target customers to learn more. Once you craft your message, ask your customer, peers and supporters to help by resharing your message on social media.
Also, to help you get started with your Small Business Saturday preparation, check out the blog post entitled, 6 Simple Things You Can Do Today To Improve Your Marketing And Get More Customers. It can help you improve your marketing efforts and reach your target customers.
