The 11 Ways to Accelerate your Personal Brand and Business Leveraging the Holidays
‘Tis the season for friends and family, expressions of gratitude, and recommitting to your personal brand sales strategy.
As we rapidly approach the end of the year, this is your last chance to boost your annual revenue and start establishing a prospecting foundation for the months to come. Fortunately, there are three things that everyone loves in December: sugar cookies with colorful frosting, planning for the next year’s success, and a year-end sale price.
That means you can leverage your prospects’ holiday deal-scoping and planning mindsets to gain their attention and motivate purchases of your products and services. We’re bringing you eleven ways to boost sales and revenue this holiday season.
1. Create a Limited-Time Holiday Offer
Create a sense of urgency by offering a special year-end offer for your products or services. Not only will your prospects be intrigued by the idea of getting a deal, but they will also be motivated to act so that they don’t miss out. Depending on your personal brand and your products and services, your year-end offer could come in the form of:
- A free consultation
- No implementation fees for your software or digital solution
- A three-month free trial of your solution
- Twenty-five percent off the annual subscription price
- A free coaching session if the buyer refers a friend who makes a session purchase
- An opportunity to buy one session and get a second session free for an upcoming conference or speaking engagement opportunity
Promote your limited-time offer via all your marketing communication channels, including your personal brand website, social media, email, your newsletter, your podcast, your YouTube channel, and at any in-person speaking events. The more places you use to reach a potential prospect, the better.
2. Cross-Sell and Upsell with a Message of Thanks
One of the best ways to boost revenue is to motivate former and current customers to make a repeat purchase or to purchase another possibly more profitable product or service. These strategies, known as cross-selling (buying a different solution) and up-selling (buying a more expensive solution), can help you boost revenue by cultivating opportunities from your already satisfied customer list.
Use the holiday season to send your former and existing customers an email message of thanks. Ideal timing is anywhere between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. Tell your customers that you appreciate their business, remind them of the value your personal brand can bring to their life, and offer them a special purchase offer (see number one above).
For more help on increasing cross-sell and up-sell conversions, read this advice from our sister company, Spiffy.
3. Seasonalize Your Social Media Platforms.
There’s a reason why nearly every commercial you watch between Halloween and New Year’s Day has a holiday theme. Every brand is attempting to leverage the holiday mindset to make its brand relevant for short-term purchasing. If this strategy can work for chocolate candies and pick-up trucks, it will work for your personal brand. Share insights, tips, best practices, photos, and videos to your social media accounts that reflect a holiday message.
For example, if you’re a life coach, share advice for setting New Year’s goals. If you sell a fitness product, provide tips for making and keeping fitness-related New Year’s resolutions. If you sell software, link to a blog discussing five ways your software will help customers save time and work more efficiently in the New Year. While such content could be relevant at any time of the year, remember that your goal is to capture the enthusiasm that everyone feels at year-end.
Bonus Ninja Tactic: We often talk about the value of being authentic. The holidays present an ideal time of year to boost your credibility by revealing personal insights about your own New Year’s goals and holiday celebrations. Share pictures of you traveling home for the holidays, wearing a funny seasonal sweater at your office, or a video of you discussing what people and things make you feel grateful.
Such personal openness and truths will make your audience feel closer to you and perceive you as more trustworthy and authentic, which will increase their likelihood of wanting to partner with your personal brand.
4. Run a One-Day, Cyber Monday Promotion
Who said Cyber Monday is only for retail products? Everyone is looking for a deal on peak holiday shopping days, and Cyber Monday is no exception. In the weeks leading up to the Monday after Thanksgiving, promote a one day sale in which you offer your deepest discounts of the year on your products and services that are available for purchase online.
gCommunicate your deal via all your available communication channels. Remind your prospects early and often about your special offer in the days that lead up to the big event. They will be inundated with sales opportunities, so you’ll want to ensure your offer gets their attention.
Bonus Ninja Tactic: Before you execute your Cyber Monday promotion, make sure your personal brand website is mobile optimized. Of the 127 million people who plan to make online purchases on Cyber Monday, 25 million of them will be shopping on a mobile device. You’ll need both a mobile-optimized personal brand website and a mobile-optimized online checkout process. Learn more about the importance of the mobile economy here.
5. Leverage Social Influencers
If you are still in the growth phase of your personal brand, and are working to position yourself as an industry thought leader, then there may still be room for influencer partnerships in your marketing strategy, especially if you are releasing a book, launching a new product or service, or hosting a new conference or workshop.
You may think that influencer marketing could be impactful every time of the year, so why focus on this tactic during the holidays? The answer lies in a recent research study that found that social media messaging to brands rises more than 30 percent during the winter season.
That’s a trend that aligns with the population’s increased use of social media during year-end when we are all looking to engage and reconnect with friends and family.
Ask other trusted experts in your space to write a testimonial about their interaction with your personal brand. Ask influencers to read and review your latest book, or identify some opportunities to attend as a guest on a popular podcast to expand your network of followers.
All of these tactics will help you grow your network of followers organically, and amplify the reach of your message by getting in front of other large communities.
6. Expand Your Email Database
Before you begin heavily promoting your holiday offerings, make an effort to increase your prospecting email list. In this blog, we share 17 tactics for accelerating your email subscriptions.
7. Host a Contest
Create for your prospects an engaging contest for the chance to win something of value that will introduce them to your personal brand and motivate them to make a future full-priced purchase. Contests are particularly intriguing during the holiday season when everyone is in the mindset of looking for a deal, sale, or a discount of something with perceived value.
For example, if you’re a corporate coach, ask your prospects to create a one-minute video explaining why their business needs your coaching services and offer the winner free coaching for three months.
If a typical coaching process takes six to nine months, after three months of valuable time spent with you, your contest winner will be likely to pay to continue utilizing your services. As a result, you get a new client, and your contest winner gets an obligation-free trial of your services before they buy.
8. Get into the Giving Spirit by Giving Your Work Away for Free
During the holiday season, not only do we feel generosity to friends and family, but we feel compelled to support those less fortunate, making everyone hyper-aware of and appreciative of feel-good holiday-helper stories. Brands can earn impactful credibility and trust by donating their work to a needy cause, such as a non-profit organization. In this blog post, we focus on how working for free can help you make more money, faster.
9. Focus Your Messaging on Emotions
It’s hard not to feel reflective, optimistic, and hopeful at the end of the year. It’s a time to think back on what went well and what we still hope to achieve next year. Leverage this mindset by focusing your marketing message on the value you can bring to your customers and how you can improve their life.
Whether you are an author, motivational speaker, coach, consultant, strategist, or a provider of any other services and solutions, flip any messaging that focuses on you and what you do to your customers and what you can do for them. We anticipate that this refocused positioning will work so well in helping you boost revenue, that you’ll continue with it long into the new year.
10. Promote Gift Certificates
If you’re like most people, then the last thing you need this holiday is one more scarf or a scented candle. Many shoppers look for creative experiential gifts for friends, family, and colleagues as more meaningful and valuable alternatives to traditional and less personal retail gifts.
If applicable to your industry and services, promote the purchase of your solutions as gifts for others. For example, target Fortune 500 companies to purchase a free executive coaching session for their C-suite staff. Encourage existing customers to buy three-months of consulting for a colleague or friend. Even if you don’t sell tangible items, you can still leverage gift certificate marketing to help prospect new customers and boost year-end sales.
11. Launch a Retargeting Advertising Campaign
Spend the last of your annual marketing budget on some holiday-themed retargeting ads. Retargeting, or remarketing, is an online marketing strategy in which advertisers can place online ads directly in front of people who previously engaged with their brand but have not visited their personal brand website recently.
Data shows that only two percent of website visitors make a purchase on their first time at a website. Retargeting puts your brand message in front of the remaining 98 percent. In a retargeting campaign, your ads will appear to previous website visitors while they navigate other websites within the retargeting ad network such as the Google Display Network (GDN). You’ll need to partner with a third-party retargeting advertising provider on this strategy, such as AdRoll or WordStream, or you’ll need to set up your retargeting ads directly through Google Ads.
Final Words of Advice
You love what you do, which means now is the perfect time of year to expand your network of customers, followers, and raving fans by sharing that love with others. Keep in mind as you execute the techniques above, that your holiday promotions should be all about authenticity and showcasing the value of your services and solutions at a time when prospects are most open to future possibilities of self-improvement. Do this, and you’ll be taking your personal brand from six to seven figures before this time next year.
