It’s Mariah Carey season folks!

It’s that time of the year when she emerges from the ocean to serenade us with holiday music and kick off the start of the holiday shopping season.

In this article, I want to give you some marketing strategies that will allow you to maximise your revenue for this holiday period. Let’s see if we can help our businesses close out the year with a bang.

Here are the five things I want your business to implement:

1) Incentivise e-commerce

2) Focus on stories and benefits

3) Curate gift ideas

4) Post-season events

5) Collaborate with other brands

Incentivise e-commerce

Having your website with your catalogue or utilising pay links/payment buttons from Fygaro or the banks e-commerce tools can help your shopping experience tremendously. Patrons are going to want to get away from traffic on the roads, and malls and giving them the option to shop online and have items delivered are going to be huge. This will also allow people to shop with your business at any time of the day.

If you want to sell through your website but unsure of the payment gateways that work with the various platforms, check out Wipay, First Atlantic Commerce, NCB or Sagicor’s website, go through their e-commerce integrations and you will see what platforms they connect with to process payments on your website. WordPress, Shopify or Wix tend to be the most flexible.

This is also a great opportunity for you to offer discount codes to push people to buy through your digital channels, that way you ensure your sales are coming in steadily throughout the Christmas season.

Focus on stories and benefits

When creating social media posts, I want you to fight every urge to take a video of a product with the price or a video of your sales rep rattling off the specifications of an item and the price. Focus on telling stories and selling the benefits of how these products or services will alleviate key pain points for your audience.

Example, one of the top questions asked over 1800x in Jamaica about mattresses in the last 30 days is “What are the best mattresses for sciatica?”. Another top question is “What are the best mattresses for side sleepers?”. Taking this information, you can create content with a physician who is breaking down the benefits of different types of beds for those with sciatica and what are the best sleep positions or pillows for them. Don’t just tell us this bed has memory foam and that it’s really good on your social media post. Tell a story, sell the benefits and show us how it solves pain points in our lives.

Curate gift ideas

One of the top questions people ask themselves every year, is what do you get someone who has everything? With so much happening in our lives right now, we don’t want to overthink what gifts to buy people.

Now is a great time for businesses to start curating gift ideas or packages. Think about the different types of people in our lives and create gift packages with each of those people in mind.

Post-holiday events

A great incentive to buy particular products would be post-holiday events. Just imagine I purchase a new Whirlpool stove and that particular item came with a free pass to a group cooking session with an esteemed chef. Think about incentivising purchases with not just discount prices but creating an event out of particular items.

Imagine selling a children’s Lego set and they get access to either an in-person or virtual Lego building session. The possibilities are endless and they allow you to build a relationship with the client beyond the initial purchase.

Collaborate with other brands

This season will be a great time to look at other companies that have synergy with your products or services and create either offers or experiences that will allow you to tap into each other’s customer bases.

Imagine a grocery partnering with a restaurant. The two create a Christmas dinner event where they have different menus and the chef from the restaurant is teaching the group how to make the menu. The goods to prepare the things on the menu are bought by the grocery partner.

People are looking for value and experiences, the companies that can figure out who they can align themselves with to give value and curate experiences for their clients are going to win big.

The last thing I will say is for businesses to establish relationships with good courier companies and heavily promote that you purchase your products online and have the items delivered. You don’t need to do deliveries for yourselves, clients will happily pay for delivery because of the time it is going to save them.

If you can put these strategies into play for the holiday season, you are going to stand out from those who are still using age-old marketing and sales tactics in hopes that they have a big holiday season.

I’m looking forward to seeing who gets creative over the next few weeks and this sets you up to start off 2023 with the right tools and mindset for success.

Keron Rose is a Digital Strategist that works with Caribbean Entrepreneurs to build their digital presence and monetize their platforms. Check out Keronrose.com to learn more or the Digipreneur FM podcast available on Apple Podcast/Spotify/Google Podcast.