November 07, 2016
5 Ways to Prepare for Small Business Saturday
These days offer the opportunity for your business to finish out the year strong, and hopefully gain new customers. While it is important to know your audience, and focus on preparing for Small Business Saturday, there are also ways to profit from Black Friday as a small business. In this post, we’ll offer tips on how to tackle these days, so that you can encourage your community to support small business, and generate sales in the process!
Stock up on inventory
Make sure that your business is prepared with new inventory for the holiday season. If you’re marketing big sales and must-have items, then you need to deliver! Don’t disappoint customers with a limited assortment of items; they’ll do their shopping elsewhere. Prior to the holiday season, examine which items are the most popular amongst your customer base. Ask frequent customers what they are looking for. By doing this research, you’ll be more likely to provide items that holiday shoppers will want to buy.
Schedule employees to work that weekend
Chances are, you may have some customers dreading working on Black Friday and Small Business Saturday. In addition to being hectic, some people might want to spend the days following Thanksgiving with their families. Come up with a fair schedule to accommodate your employee’s needs, but ensure that you have enough people working to make Small Business Saturday run smoothly. If you’re going to be open on both Black Friday and Small Business Saturday, come up with a schedule so that employees aren’t scheduled to work on both days, unless they request to do so. While you’ll want to be fair to your employees, you’ll also need to have plenty of help on these busy days.
Create eye-catching marketing campaigns
Encourage the people in your community to support small business! Market your Small Business Saturday promotions, highlighting the importance of shopping small. When shoppers think of where they are going to do their holiday shopping, they might think of department stores and their fancy marketing efforts. Don’t get discouraged! Brainstorm with your team on how you can market your brand; what do you have to offer this holiday season that your competitors don’t? Thinking of these reasons will likely help inspire your Small Business Saturday marketing campaign.
Review customer service tactics
Small Business Saturday presents an advantageous opportunity to show off your business’s stellar customer service. More than likely, you’ll be serving a wider range of customers than you do on a day-to-day basis, so you’ll need to be ready to accommodate them. Patrons won’t want to support small business if they don’t receive attentive customer service, which is why this should be one of your top priorities.
Offer incentives customers can’t resist
Part of the reason that big brands excel during the holidays is that they offer unbeatable Black Friday prices and freebies! If you’re trying to attract customers to your store for Black Friday and Small Business Saturday, make sure to spread out your sales and other incentives, so that you’re able to reward customers who visit your business on both days.
Hopefully these Small Business Saturday tips will help you get prepared for the busiest shopping weekend of the year! Have any helpful tips of your own to share? Let us know in the comment section below.