by Hope
Do you participate in Black Friday shopping, Cyber Monday or even Small Business Saturday? Traditionally, I have not paid the slightest attention to these “holidays.” In fact, I tend to avoid them as a cost saving measure. (The same with Tax Free Weekend.)
But, I am working on being more strategic as a small business owner, and want to take advantage of the marketing opportunities these “shopping days” give me. Since I don’t have a physical product, I am not sure how to use it to my advantage.
Upcoming “Shopping” Holidays
Saturday, November 30 – Small Business Saturday
Friday, November 29 – Black Friday
Monday, December 2 – Cyber Monday
Worth It for a Business Owner
I would love your input…
I offer a variety of services…some as hourly packages, some as one off consultations and then web design and refreshes. I thought I might offer special pricing on each type of service.
I could even offer a “new customer” special as well. Just brainstorming…
What do you think? Do specials that businesses offer during these “holidays” tempt you? Do you think it’s worth the effort to come up with something? Or money to advertise it? (Outside of my existing mailing lists, of course.)
And do you think that as a service business versus physical product that using these “holidays” is a good marketing move? I’m working on some marketing campaign assets now for a variety of my clients, so thought I would take the time to make some for myself as well. And I would love to hear your feedback.
Hope is a digital marketing manager and foster/adoptive single mom to five kids. She has run her own consulting company for over 15 years and took a leap of faith returning to the corporate world in 2021 to a job and team she loves! Hope began sharing her journey with the BAD community in the Spring of 2015 and feels like she has finally mastered the balance between family first and wise financial decisions.
Hope,
It’s going to be very difficult to offer informed advice as the best decision really requires knowing a lot more about the details of your business than we have. But, based on my rough understanding from posts you made a few months ago, it seems that recently your challenge has not been so much in finding clients/billable hours, rather juggling all the work you already have. In that light, and in line with the suggestion I made at the time, offering a discount on your rate/services seems like a decision that would be counter productive.
One “sketchy” way to do it would be to raise your rates and then offer the current rate as the “discounted rate”. Plenty of companies do this or the equivalent (e.g. Amazon for many of their Prime Day “deals”), and it may even be appropriate if you are planning on raising your rates anyway. (Perhaps offer existing clients an opportunity to lock in a period of time at the old rate).