Welcome back to Making Good, the podcast for small businesses who want to make a big impact.
I’m your host, Lauren Tilden, and this is episode 85.
This episode comes out on October 26, 2021, which is EXACTLY one month before Black Friday. For many listeners, particularly those in the product-based business world, the period of time between Black Friday and the end of the year is the busiest and most important sales time of the year.
So, how can we make sure that we do all we can to have a successful, prosperous holiday season.. Without driving ourselves to complete and total burn out?
The answer to that question, my friends, is through making and executing a plan in advance.
In this episode, I’m sharing my process for making a workable plan for the end of the year rush.
Before we jump into the episode, though. I have some super, super exciting news to share with you.
---
And that is THIS: Making Good is going PRO!
This new monthly membership is called Making Good Happen, and it’s for those of you who want to take everything you learn here on Making Good to the next level.
Making Good Happen is designed to make sure that we’re taking the actions we need to take to move the needle in our businesses…. In this monthly membership, we’ll work together on creating and IMPLEMENTING a marketing plan that will take your business where you want it to go. A private podcast, accountability, and focused work sessions are included…. It’s going to be so good.
I’ll be sharing more in the coming weeks, so STAY TUNED (and make sure you’re following me over @laurentilden for all the inside deets as I share them). In fact, for a sneak peek of the details, just DM me the word PRO and I’ll share some of the inside scoop!
OKAY! So let’s talk about planning for the end of the year.
In college, I had a routine every December. I went to school outside of Boston. During finals week, I would stay up most of the night drinking coffee and Diet Dr. Pepper (and eating Gardetto’s), and cram cram cram for all of my midterms and exams. I would get an hour or two of sleep, and wake up and repeat the day all over again for a week or two, before finally packing up to fly home to Seattle.
And just about every year, I would get SO SO SO sick in December. Run down, depleted, and so burned out that it took my body getting seriously sick to make me start taking better care of myself.
I’ve never gotten quite to my college-level burnout since then, but the last couple of seasons as a small business owner have definitely gotten me close.
So, this begs the question. How do have a super successful (whatever that means to you) November and December, WITHOUT burning out so badly that you need all of Q1 to recover?
The answer is PLANNING.
And while I plan to some extent all year long, I’m much more relaxed about it until this time of year comes around.
But I get pretty serious about my plan this time of year.
So, I thought I would share with you what I’m doing in case you’re looking for some ideas on how to get your next few months organized and working in a way that works for you and doesn’t ruin your holidays… or your health.
Step 1: Get out your calendar.
I like to actually print a physical calendar out, with separate pages for each month. I’ll later transfer everything to my project management system and/or calendar, but for the planning process, I think it’s super helpful to have a pencil and paper to get things organized.
You can find some blank calendar templates on Canva, or just go to the calendar app on your computer and print out a couple of blank months. If you’re following along with this process, let’s just print November and December calendars for now.
Step 2: Put your personal life in.
The next step is to put your big dates and commitments personally in this calendar.
For example, will you be traveling at all over November and December? Which days do you want to dedicate fully to preparing for the holidays… personally? Which days do you want to dedicate fully to spending time with your friends and family -- COVID-safe of course!? Which days do you want to lay on the couch watching a marathon of Murder She Wrote or the Great British Bake Off? Which days do you want to spend the day making sugar cookies for your neighbors?
Seriously. What are your favorite things to do over the holidays? It’s far too easy to let your business creep in and take over all of the time for these wonderful moments, and the way to prevent that from happening is by scheduling them and blocking that time out of your calendar.
Step 3: Put the big business dates and deadlines in.
Here’s where the planning starts to get serious. Now we’re going to add all of the major dates and deadlines that you will be communicating to your audience. This includes any sales, shipping deadlines, etc.
Some recommended things to think about:
Are you launching a new product? When?
Are you doing a promo for Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, or Cyber Monday? Or perhaps something that covers all of those dates, collectively sometimes called Small Business Weekend? Put the starting and ending dates in.
When is the last day you can reasonably guarantee delivery prior to Christmas. Please make sure to consult with whatever organization you use for shipping - there’s a lot of turmoil in the shipping industry these days, particularly with USPS, and shipping deadlines are generally EARLIER than they are most years.
Also, consider what fulfilling orders looks like. If you’re really, really busy, maybe you need to make the order date a little earlier so that you get everything out in time.
If you’re taking a week off at the end of December, maybe you want to include a note on your website that says, “all orders placed after December 20th will be fulfilled in January” -- or even put your shop on pause altogether.
Do you have any other kinds of campaigns going in the next couple of months?
Are you offering any kind of holiday “gift” or letter, whether personalized or by email? When is that going out?
Are you doing or saying anything relative to the New Year?
What holidays in November and December will you be acknowledging and celebrating through your business?
A quick run-down to consider, as I think it’s important to be as inclusive as possible:
NOV 2: US General Election
NOV 4: Diwali
NOV 11: Veteran’s Day
NOV 25: Thanksgiving Day — I like to make sure to acknowledge the difficult history of Thanksgiving on this day
NOV 28 - DEC 6: Hanukkah
DEC 21: Winter Solstice
DEC 23: Festivus
DEC 25: Christmas
DEC 26 - JAN 1: Kwanzaa
DEC 31: New Year’s Eve
Step 4: Plan out your marketing.
Now it’s time to actually put your pencil to paper and start making the plan. I typically think through my marketing in terms of:
Website
Email marketing
Long-form content (blog, videos, podcast)
Social media
Other (print, PR, etc.)
For each of these dates, and deadlines, what are you planning to do and say about them in your different marketing platforms.
I’ll usually mark onto the calendar all of the days that are going to have an email, and I’ll number them. Email #1, Email #2, Email #3 = then on a separate sheet of paper or list, write down what the purpose of each of those emails is.
Same with Instagram. When are you posting a carousel? An image? A Reel? Label them with numbers and then go back later and decide what you’re going to say in each of them in advance.
For example:
For each of the holidays, I’ll plan a piece of social media content
For my product launch for Good Sheila,
I’ll start an email waitlist for more details (since there’s a limited quantity of what I’m selling) a couple weeks before the launch
I’ll communicate the date of the launch frequently to build excitement, by both email and social, as well as on my website
During the launch, I’ll make it available to my email waitlist 24 hours in advance of my public launch
During the launch, I’ll send an email about it every day, as well as promote on social
For my Black Friday/Small Business Weekend promotion, I’ll communicate the details in advance by email and on social media.
During the sale, I’ll send an email every single day about it to stay top of mind and post about it on social
For the December shipping deadline, I’ll do quite a bit of promoting it:
I’ll make a post about it on social media a couple weeks in advance, and mention it frequently. Right before the deadline I’ll post about it again.
I’ll send a couple of emails about it, with a higher frequency of emails coming right before the deadline
On my website I will have a banner at the top about the shipping deadline to set expectations
After the shipping deadline has passed, I will promote digital gift cards.
For New Year’s Eve, I like to send a “State of the Union” type email. I’ll mention on social that it’s coming for a couple of days so people can be on the list if they want to receive it
I’ll then send the email on Dec 31st, and post some of the highlights on social
When it comes to Instagram Stories, I have to admit I’m not always awesome at this, but I like to be as active as I possibly can during all of this time, posting both behind the scenes of life stuff, as well as details about the launch.
After we’ve gone through and created content around the main dates and deadlines on your calendar, we need to fill in marketing in the other dates and weeks that aren’t as busy with promos and deadlines. It’s important during these weeks to continue showing up with useful and engaging content, so it doesn’t feel like we’re only showing up for our marketing when we are directly promoting something we’re selling. In these weeks, think about creating content that is designed to grow your audience and nurture your existing audience. Think about Value Added Marketing (more on that a bit later).
One more thing before we move on to the next step. Remember how the FIRST thing we did in this planning process was to put in your personal non-negotiable dates?
We need to make sure that the marketing plan we create is something we can REALISTICALLY get done in advance, so that we’re not forced to cut into that personal time we are trying to protect.
Remember with marketing that it’s never perfect. You can *ALWAYS* do more. But don’t let that stop you from creating a plan and doing what you can reasonably do -- because it WILL make a difference.
Step 5: Schedule the creation of this content into your calendar.
Now, making a plan is one thing, but actually following through on it? That’s the hard part.
That’s why it’s important to build yourself out a LOT of time in advance to create this content.
And, importantly: actually physically put it in your calendar when you’re going to create this content. Maybe you can block off the better part of a week to put your head down and blow through this. Maybe you have an hour or two chunk every day that you can allocate.
If you look at your plan, and then look at your calendar, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be possible to get everything created, you have two options:
You can scale back your plan. Send emails less frequently, post less frequently, and stick to the critical dates and messages.
You can enlist help. A team member or social media manager or assistant.
I like to work through this piece by piece. For example, I’ll record ALLL of my podcasts in a short time frame, get them edited, and then scheduled. Then I’ll move on to writing my marketing emails. Then I’ll create the social media graphics. And so on.
You could also think about working on your content a week at a time. So, for example, you might spend a full day creating ALL OF YOUR CONTENT for the week of November 1st. Then a few days later, creating ALL OF YOUR CONTENT For the week of November 8th. Whatever works best for you.
Step 6: Schedule content in advance.
Once you’ve created the content, it’s very important to schedule it out in advance using a tool that is designed to help you do just that.
So once we’ve designed our marketing emails, we want to put them into our email marketing tool, get them all designed, test and edit them, and then schedule them to be automatically sent out at the right time.
With our social media, we want to create as much as possible now, and then schedule it using a tool like Facebook Creator Studio, Later, Planoly, etc. to go out on the proper dates.
There are some things that are harder to schedule, and instead you’ll want to add those to your project management system or you calendar so you get reminded.
For example, changing details / dates / announcements on your website homepage is something that you’ll probably have to go in and manually do at the right times.
Behind the scenes Instagram stories, are another example of something that are a little bit harder to schedule in advance.
A couple of final thoughts
Something I’ve realized since starting this podcast is that I could probably host an entire podcast about the topic of perfectionism, because it’s something i continue to face and contend with pretty much every day.
So if you’re also prone to perfectionism, let me hopefully pre-empt yours a little bit…
Your plan will go off the rails. You’ll plan a lot of stuff, and it’s not all going to come out like you hope it will. You might not have time to create content for a few weeks, and then byt the time you sit down to do it feel like you’re way too late to start your holiday marketing and what’s the point. You might make mistakes somewhere in your launch. You might bump into some unexpected situation that throws a wrench in your plans.
But I want to encourage you that whatever effort you can put into your holiday marketing, as long as you’re doing it intentionally, will pay off. During November and December, people are receiving a LOT of messages from brands, and so every time you can pop up in an email or on social media is an important opportunity to remind your audience that you’re there and a good option to consider for their holiday shopping.
Let’s also talk about your marketing philosophy. For most of us, we are sending out a LOT more marketing than usual during November and December, so I want to encourage you keep in mind my favorite marketing philosophy: Added Value Marketing. The underlying principal behind Value Added Marketing is that the best business practice is treating our customers well -- viewing them as customers, and not just dollar signs.
We’ve talked quite a bit in this episode about when to send out your marketing messages, but when you actually sit down to think about WHAT to say, really do your best to put yourself in your ideal customer’s shoes. What are they experiencing at this time of year? Are they stressed? Overwhelmed? Lonely? Cash-strapped?
The better you know your ideal customer, the better you’ll know the answers to these questions.
And when you think about what they’re experiencing during this time of year, you can think about what VALUE you can add to their lives to make things better in some way.
What can you teach them?
How can you make them feel less alone?
How can you entertain them?
How can you inspire them?
What resource can you provide for them?
How can you make something easier for them?
These are just a few questions that might help get your wheels turning when you’re thinking about what to say during all of your holiday marketing.
Make sure that the content you create relating to these questions is also relevant to your product, and maybe you tag the product at the bottom somewhere, or mention it, or maybe there’s a photo of your product in the graphic. But the main point of most of these messages will be to serve in some way.
Now, of course we do need to occasionally say, “HI! DO YOU WANT TO BUY MY PRODUCT?” this is important. It should be very very obvious what you sell and who it’s for when someone comes across your brand. But I like to aim for the main focus being adding value 80-90% of the time, and directly asking for the sale about 10-20% of the time.
If you’re interested in hearing more about the topic of Value Added Marketing, check out episode 69 of Making Good which is all about this. I’ll link to that in the show notes.
So! That’s what I’m doing to plan for the end of this year. I hope this little peek behind the curtains into how I run my businesses is helpful and that you got some ideas for your own business!
Let’s connect on Instagram! Take a screenshot while you’re listening to this episode and tag me on Instagram @laurentilden. I would love to connect with you and cheer you on!
If you enjoyed this episode, I would so so love for you to leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find all the notes from this episode at makinggoodpodcast.com/85.
If you’re interested in learning more about my small businesses, Good Sheila and Station 7 -- the links are in the show notes!
I would so love to have you in the Facebook community for this podcast: head to makinggoodpodcast.com/community to join.
Finally, make sure you’re following me on Instagram @laurentilden to make sure you get allllll the details on the PRO version of this podcast coming soon, Making Good Happen. (If you want a sneak peek on the details, just DM me the word PRO and I’ll send ya some of the inside scoop).
Thank you for being here, and for focusing on making a difference with your small business!
Talk to you next time.