MBA2200 Q&A Wednesday: Should I stop spending on marketing during the holidays?

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Edu So John asks on today's Q and A Wednesday, should he stop spending money on marketing during the holidays? I'm going to give you a rule. I'm going to give you just a rule of thumb that you can follow when it comes to marketing spend. You only stop marketing when you want to stop getting customers. It's that simple. Marketing gets you customers. When you stop that engine, when you stop that flow, you stop the customer flow. That's just how it is. I'm not saying this sarcastically. Some people want to stop getting customers because they've reached their capacity. They can't serve any more customers. And in that case, that's when you stop marketing. You shut off the valve. But if that's not the case for you, if you can handle more customers and you want more customers, then you should not stop marketing, even during the holidays. Because maybe they are not going to buy, but they'll do other things. And of course you can optimize your ads so you're only spending when you convert. Let me give you a few examples. Let's say you have a product that you sell. This could be a physical product. This could be a digital product like a book or a course or coaching or training. It doesn't matter. People don't buy instantly. They don't buy directly from the ad. That's just not how sales works. What marketing does is that it brings awareness to your product and hopefully converts them into a lead. Meaning you add them to your email list so that then you can build a relationship with them, earn their trust, give them value so they can eventually turn into a customer. You can do this with your marketing during the holidays. You can just make it a lead generating campaign so that when the holidays are up and it's the new year, you can capitalize on those leads, you can nurture them, you can invite them to a webinar, you can go back and forth on email, you can schedule some calls. Whatever your process is to close sales. That's when you can start doing that. But the marketing portion is what gets you the leads. So if you stop marketing, then when it's time to sell, you have nobody to sell to. And this is where people confuse marketing and sales. Again, people don't click on an ad and just buy directly off the ad. This just does not happen. Look at the way you buy. Most of the time when you click on an ad, you start to learn about a product or service, you're thinking about it. You might join their newsletter or their email list. You start getting offers, maybe some coupons, and eventually you pull the trigger and buy. So in my opinion, the holiday season is a great time for you to start thinking about, hey, how do I reach new audiences? How do I get people to know who I am, have brand awareness? How do I get them at least to the point where they're willing to give up their name and email address so that they can get some sort of freebie or value or get a taste of my content or training or whatever it might be? If this is the case, then you should optimize your ads for conversions. Meaning you want to show these ads to people that are most likely to convert to a lead. The conversion in this case is opting into your list. The platforms like Instagram and Facebook and Google, they will optimize the ads for that. So they're not gonna show the ad every single person. They're going to try to optimize it for people that will actually convert. But let's say you did do that. You did just show the ad to every single person. People are still on social media. You're still getting their attention. You're still giving them a taste or awareness of what you're all about. Think of it this way. Billboards don't just go blank during the holidays, right? TV commercials don't just all of a sudden disappear during the holidays. Marketing is like planting the seeds. It's like nurturing the soil of your farm, of your crops, so that later on you can harvest the crops, they can grow and you can harvest and you can make those sales. Now, a few caveats, a few things to keep in mind. Take a look at your ads during the holidays. Make sure they're applicable. If you're selling, say for example, holiday based gifts and it's past Christmas, then you want to change that ad. So it's maybe New Year's gifts or a more general ad that is focused on your actual store or your general products and services. I can't tell you how many companies I'VE seen keep ads running well past Christmas for Christmas gift ideas. You know, it's March 27th and I'm getting an ad from major department stores that say, hey, last minute shopping. Buy this for Christmas. Christmas is well done and dusted. That's a waste of money, right? The other thing you need to consider is that if you're posting ads, often people will comment on the ads, like on Facebook, ask questions. Just be aware that people might be doing that during the holidays. So if your team is off, if you're off, you just need to be mindful that somebody is checking up on that once a day or once every two days to make sure that somebody gets a reply. Another thing I want to tell you is that if you're doing marketing via email, just nurturing your audience, or even sponsoring other newsletters, meaning that you have an ad in other people's newsletters. This is a form of marketing. Doing it during the holidays is actually a pretty good time. People have more time during the holidays. They're a little bit bored maybe. Maybe they're at a family member's home, they're trying to zone out in their phone, they're going to check their inbox, they're going to see what else is going on, and they might be more receptive to reading those emails. There's a lot of downtime during the holidays and people are not as go, go, go, rush, rush, rush, so they have time to consume your content. The other thing I want to consider is if you serve a global market, not every country celebrates Christmas, not every culture celebrates Christmas. It's not such a big deal or a big holiday as a lot of Western countries. And you may want to target your ads to different countries. New Year's, on the other hand, is pretty global from my experience. My other piece of advice is to read the room. If you're serving customers, you're a B2C, not businesses. Right after Christmas, people pretty much spent a lot of money on gifts. Now, not everybody is going to be broke. A lot of people have plenty of disposable cash. But you may want to poke fun at that situation a little bit with your marketing. Whether you suggest spending the money that they get from returning gifts on your product or service, or acknowledging the fact that, hey, maybe money's tight right now. That's why you want to go with a valuable economic choice like your business, if that's your brand. Now, if you are a B2B, if you're serving businesses, the start of the year is huge. People want to hit the ground running right after New Year's to succeed in life in business to accomplish their goals and resolutions. People are open and ready to spend money on these things. So tailor your messaging and your marketing around these events.

Is it time to reimagine your future? The right business skills may make a difference in your career. At Capella University, we offer a relevant education that's designed to focus on what you need to know in the business world. We'll teach professional skills to help you pursue your goals like business management, strategic planning, and effective communication, and you can apply these skills right away. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella Eduardo.

To wrap up today's questions, Today's Q and A Wednesday's episode should you spend money on marketing during the holidays? Definitely yes in my experience. Actually it's cheaper to market during this time, especially between Christmas and New Year. It's probably one of the cheapest times to market online in digital ads during the holidays because people make the mistake of pulling their cash out. This makes it a far less competitive and a lot cheaper for you as a small business to build relationships, to build leads so that you can capitalize on those leads and make them customers when the new year rolls around. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show and thanks John for your question on Q and A Wednesday. If you got a question you want to ask just like John did, just go ahead and email me over at Omar100- MBA net and I'll make sure to answer it right here on Q and A Wednesday. Let me know if you want me to keep it anonymous. I'll make sure that but by asking a question, but by emailing me, I get to help you. But others that are listening that have the same challenge and trust me, I've been doing this for a while. Most challenges not that unique. Thanks again. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Earlier on in my career as an entrepreneur, I used to have a post it note posted on my monitor that said abm always be marketing. Marketing is something that you gotta keep on doing constantly to keep your business growing, to keep the leads flowing, to keep the traffic flowing, to give you an opportunity to make more sales. Without marketing, you got nobody to talk to. So keep it coming. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

Is it time to reimagine your future? The right business skills may make a difference in your career at Capella University. We offer a relevant education that's designed to focus on what you need to know in the business world. We'll teach professional skills to help you pursue your goals like business management, strategic planning and effective communication, and you can apply these skills right away. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella Eduardo.