​From Thanksgiving to Christmas there’s a battle that occurs for consumer dollars. The big guy against the little guy, the brick-and-mortar versus the online retailer, everyone is looking for a bigger piece of the pie. It’s time to start thinking about your holiday marketing.

​If you have a brick-and-mortar location, chances are you're doing some sort of decorating for the holidays. Even if you don't celebrate, it's likely your customers do so in order to spread the holiday cheer you get festive.
 
The same should be true of your website. While you don't need to decorate per se, you do need to prepare for holiday traffic. Even if what you do or sell has nothing to do with Christmas, people often turn to the internet or online solutions during the holiday season. Plus, if you run a business that helps people prepare for the holidays, even if just peripherally, you want to make sure your website is ready. Here's how you can go about doing that: 

​By now you’ve likely seen the statistics that shopping small/local keeps roughly $68 out of every $100 in our community, whereas shopping at a national chain means about $43 remains here. Why is that important and what does it mean to you and your family? A lot more than you may think.

How Small Business Spending Makes a Big Difference in Our Community

Where Do the Dollars Go?
​While it’s difficult to track the exact path of a dollar spent locally versus one spent at a chain, you can imagine it looks something like this:

​That image is an example of what’s called “indirect impact.” Indirect impact is felt when a local business owner or employee spends the money they make locally but it’s not the only kind of impact that can be felt by spending local.

If you own a business you probably spend a lot of time thinking of different ways you can sell your product or service. Maybe you’ve investigated neuro-marketing or tried one of these sales approaches. A hard, persuasive sell is getting more difficult these days, isn’t it?

Relationships are becoming incredibly important to brands, especially with social media. So is content marketing. Everyone wants infotainment. They long for information that is engaging and solid, not too long, not too short. Consumers are like Goldilocks nowadays.

But there’s so much noise out there. How do you get heard and give them what they want? Whether you’re producing an article, copy, videos, or podcasts, here are a few simple concepts to keep in mind as you create your content. These approaches are used by copywriters everywhere because they work.

​Whether your team works from home or in an office, whether you are a business of one or one hundred and one, taking care and making time for wellness is becoming increasingly important. Stress levels because of what’s going on in the world around us are increasing. You may not even be aware of the outside stress someone is under.
 
Making sure you create an atmosphere where wellness is stressed and made a priority is critical to successful performance. Stressed out employees make more mistakes and have difficulty making good decisions. 

​If you’re like me—and almost everyone else in this country—the end of the year is a time to look back and assess. I enjoy the nostalgia and reminiscing that occurs at this time of year, but it can also be a time of dread. It’s a time to realize you either hit the mark or you didn’t. And if you did, you may be apprehensive about being able to do it again in the new year.
 
So, we make resolutions.

We tell ourselves we’re going to do X differently this year. And most of us fall short of X because we forget about it, or we fall back into old routines because they are easy and we know how they work.
 
But this year, if you’re going to take on a resolution, we have some tips for you. The goal is to make resolutions more intuitive and doable. Here are a couple of ways to do that.

​We’re down to the last two weeks before Christmas with some of the biggest shopping days of the season still ahead of us. Since every sale can help your future marketing, it’s essential that over the next few weeks you think not only of the money, but the data you can garner from each sale as well. But don’t stress. You still have time to implement these important activities for big results.

​Things You Need to Do During Small Business Season
Don’t let the biggest sales season go by without gathering this data and implementing some of these activities to help with future marketing:

​Okay, so this might not be a “secret” weapon, but email marketing can help extend the push to shop small that began on Small Business Saturday. These types of gentle reminders can keep customers buying from you all season (and all year) long. You just need a couple of great ideas, an email marketing tool (like MailChimp or Constant Contact), and of course an email list.

There is nothing more convenient than whipping out your phone, typing in a URL (or opening an app), perusing offerings, and hitting a few buttons to buy something…anything…everything. We even get our groceries that way these days. But as convenient as online shopping seems, there are several reasons to shop local.

In person is the way to go this Small Business Season. If you can suspend disbelief for a few minutes, we’ll explain why.

Our Favorite Reasons to Shop Local During Small Business Season

​For a while, marketers have been telling people how to build relationships with potential customers on social media. They’ve shown them how to nurture a potential customer through the sales cycle to make a buying decision.
 
And that’s what businesses have been focused on.
 
But your social networks need to be doing double duty now.

​Yes, attracting new customers is important but there’s another great need right now—employees. You need to attract people to work with you and retain those you currently have.
 
Social media is an incredibly strong way to do this.
 
Consider the following types of posts to help you be seen as an employer of choice.