12 Ways Service-Based Businesses Can Take Advantage of the Holiday Season
The Young Entrepreneur Council has some advice for service businesses and how they don't have to sit on the sidelines during the holiday shopping season.
It's no secret that product based businesses can get a lot of attention and extra sales during the holiday season. Because of that, professional services can often overlook the opportunities for a boost in revenue during the shopping season, but there are different tactics and strategies to implement that can help them get a “piece of the pie” too. Read on for some examples offered by Entrepreneurs that service-based businesses can implement for the holidays.
Read the full article at: smallbiztrends.com
Coronavirus: How small businesses can boost holiday sales in 2020
Many consumers will do most of their shopping with local retailers. Small businesses need a digital plan to stay close to customers amid coronavirus pandemic.
Nearly seven in 10 small businesses see the winter holiday season as a top sales opportunity for their business, according to The Visa Back to Business Study – Holiday Edition. Small businesses have already faced unprecedented challenges in 2020, and the holiday season appears set to bring plenty of its own, amid a shaky economy and continued concerns about another wave of coronavirus infections. Read more to learn what all small businesses should focus on to ensure a successful 2020 holiday sales season.
Read the full article at: www.cnbc.com
5 evolving marketing strategies for the COVID-19 holiday season
This year, with so much uncertainty due to the pandemic, many marketers are wondering how to evolve their strategies for a holiday season that will be like no other. The marketing strategy that was right just a couple of months ago isn’t anymore.
Results from a new Adobe study of 1,000 consumers aims to help marketers understand how to prepare for what buying habits are ahead:
- 75% of shoppers are keeping with their holiday traditions but there'll be less demand for new brands
- 40% of consumers are looking for “distraction marketing” – messages that take them away from Covid realities; especially for Gen Z & Millennials
- With few places to go, 70% of consumers are saving more than they did pre-pandemic and most are looking for marketing that helps them find a good deal
- Buy online/pickup in store continues to grow at a staggering rate: 259% in 12 months
Read the full article at: blog.adobe.com
CEO confidence rebounds, fueled by decreasing pessimism, improving prospects for revenues [Q3 2020 Vistage survey]
Signs of life in the economy and an increase of business activity has led to an increase in confidence of small and midsize business CEOs. The Vistage CEO Confidence Index rebounded to 82.8 in Q3 from 62.5 in Q2.
Source: myvistage.com
Factors that contributed to the rebound from last quarter include (#5 is a doozey):
- 32.5% improvements in revenue expectations
- 29.2% improvement in profitability expectations
- 28.3% increase in investment plans, largely driven by a significant decline in contraction
- 25.4% improvement in workforce plans
- 10.1% improvement in expectations for the U.S. economy – from 93% of CEOs being pessimistic to 83% (still a worryingly high number)
How to Evolve Your Digital Marketing Strategy in times of CoVID-19
The following list of strategies and tips, compiled by our online digital marketing training team, will help your company navigate CoVID-19 limitations.
Source: www.yourdmac.com
The ability to adjust your marketing strategy to meet unexpected demands or market conditions is the hallmark of good management. During these continued times of uncertainty, when every day brings new challenges, it can sometimes be difficult to see the “strategic” forest for the “tactical” trees that seem to need our attention every day. Sales Renewal works with our clients every day to ensure we keep an eye on the forest, ensuring that the underlying strategy is sound enough to weather this storm on multiple fronts, including digital strategies. Read more in this article by DMAC about how your online presence should adapt during the Covid era.
Despite Economic Uncertainty, Small Businesses Are Gaining Optimism
CEO confidence in their businesses is growing despite economic uncertainty, according to the July Vistage/Wall Street Journal survey.
Source: www.vistage.com
We’re going to start posting this WSJ monthly of Small Businesses each month.
The WSJ spun the July report as significant improvement but there’s a glass half empty/full aspect to it.
Yes 75.% is a great improvement in confidence over 44.7% but it’s still DOWN 80% from where it was in Feb.
Q2 2020 North American M&A Report | PitchBook
M&A activity in Q2 2020 continued to decline as COVID-19 remained an unrelenting problem in North America, and especially the US. Nevertheless, certain sectors are seeing pockets of stable dealmaking.
Source: pitchbook.com
M&A activity in the second quarter of 2020 continued to decline, with $336.8 billion over 2,025 transactions. This is a substantial decline from the record activity seen in recent years which the report calls “the canary in an M&A coalmine.” Quarter over quarter declines were 41.1% and 24.2% for deal value and count, respectively, compared to an already slow Q1 2020.
More Customers Are Shopping Online Now Than At Height Of Pandemic, Fueling Need For Digital Transformation
The trend shows that online shopping growth isn’t going away and that brands need to re-assess their digital offerings to create the best experience possible.
Source: www.forbes.com
Research is showing that even though stores and restaurants are slowly opening back up, shopping and ordering food online have continued to rise.
If your business doesn’t have an online presence or any way to offer your services online, now is the time to begin building out ways to reach your consumers better and conduct your business virtually. The road to getting back to normal is still a long one, so attempting to wait it out and avoid transitioning may hurt your business and cause you to lose clients.
Business owners should be confident that their website is easy to navigate and offers clients what they need. Whether it’s selling products or services, scheduling online appointments or delivering resources, your website should be a good alternative to conducting the same business as you would in person. If it isn’t, consider making the decision to transition and contact Sales Renewal to see how we can help make you more reachable to consumers online.
Webinar: Crafting Products and Services to Reduce Time-to-First-Dollar
The Problem: Prospects Sit In Your Pipeline Too Long
Many service providers often have a single, all-inclusive service that’s presented as a binary choice: hire us for the whole service or don’t hire us. Because these services are typically important and consequential (e.g., wealth managers help save for retirement, lawyers defend against lawsuits, architects design bridges, …) prospects are typically in no rush to make a decision. They like kicking the tires to be sure you are the right guy or gal and your firm is the best choice for such an important decision.
The end result is prospects sit in your pipeline too long.
This is our recent webinar for USA 500 Clubs, a community for successful Trusted Advisers in which we share and elaborate on this post’s insights.
Targeting & Reaching Your Fastest Prospects
Of course, one of the primary goals of marketing is to move prospects through the sales pipeline as quickly as possible and a tried and true marketing strategy that does this is to define, target and reach your fastest prospects: those who most need you, when they most need you (aka, “lowest hanging fruit”).
Importantly, this focus on fastest prospects accelerates and improves the performance of all lead generation marketing tactics: advertising, email marketing, content marketing, networking, all of them perform better when targeting prospects at the precise moment they have the most critical need for your service.
For example, one of the fastest types of prospects for a wealth manager is middle class, middle-aged people who have just received an inheritance: they probably don’t have a current wealth manager, know much about investing and are highly motivated to put their new money to work for their retirement.
Employing Content Marketing and SEO tactics, you could (1) write a blog post titled “What to Do and Not Do with an Inheritance” (a subject that these prospects would probably be very interested in) and (2) work to have it rank well in search engines so that it’s easily findable and widely available.
Reevaluate Your Offerings
A more fundamental approach to reducing the time-to-first-dollar would be to take a fresh look at your services from a Product Marketing perspective (product marketers are responsible for designing, creating and managing profitable products and services):
Here are two proven product marketing strategies that minimize time-to-first-dollar for service businesses (and that product businesses use all the time):
New services for your fastest prospects: do your fastest prospects need different services than the ones you have now? If you developed new ones specifically for them, would they buy even faster, pay more, be more loyal, etc.?
Unbundle your all-inclusive service to make it easier to become your customer: can you unbundle your service to create simpler, more focused services so there’s less of a barrier to doing business with you? These new entry point services should be less expensive and consequential and should ideally provide a natural upgrade path to the rest of your services.
For example, the first thing a wealth manager typically does with a new client is to create a financial plan. What if instead of insisting they sign on for all your wealth management services in order to get a financial plan, you spun out a new standalone, financial planning service?
There will be more prospects for this new entry point service and they will move much faster through your pipeline because: financial planning can be marketed using traditional lead generation techniques like advertising and is a lot less risky than investment management (the most you can lose with a bad financial plan is its fee, unlike bad investments which can ruin lives).
Importantly, financial planning creates many opportunities for a wealth manager to show off their skills, intelligence and trustworthiness and creates a natural upgrade path. If they’ve been suitably impressed with the development of their financial plan, they will turn to you to implement the plan.
Takeaways
- Focus on targeting & reaching your “fastest” prospects: those who most need you when they most need you.
- Develop new services for your “fastest” prospects
- Unbundle your all-inclusive service to create tiered services with upgrade paths. The entry-point service should be less risky and require less commitment & dollars
Sales Renewal Can Help
Sales Renewal is working with all of our clients on refining their business and marketing strategies for the Covid era. Whether it’s shortening the “time-to-first-dollar”, implementing minimal contact sales and marketing programs, creating alternatives to traditional face-to-face marketing, or revamping communications to earn trust, contact us to learn what we can do for you.
reCAPTCHA: Easy on Humans, Hard on Bots
Source: www.google.com
Sales Renewal has implemented Google’s newer, invisible reCAPTCHA on all our hosting clients’ sites, as well as our own. This new technology improves the user experience of filling forms and reduces the friction of capturing leads, as well as adding an additional layer of spam prevention. Regular tech upgrades such as this are part of how we make sure our clients are best situated to increase their revenue.