Staying Strong Through the Holiday Slowdown

For businesses that remain open during the holiday season, those couple weeks can be a slow time. Clients that you do business with may have closed up shop, and many people take time off to spend with family in the week or so between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Within your organization, your employees might be taking vacations and half-days. However, there are still ways you can keep your operations running strong so that you can come back from the holiday season and hit the ground running. Here are some tips to consider: Boost your social media presence. If people are spending less time at work over the holidays, chances are they’re spending more time on social media. Take advantage of this by interacting more with your audience through Twitter and Facebook — or offer special holiday deals. It’s a simple and inexpensive way to keep your brand engagement going strong during an otherwise slow period for business. Keep an eye on the calendar. Most U.S. markets are closed on both Christmas and New Year’s Day. These both fall on the same day of the week (a Wednesday this year). Therefore, it might be best to focus your marketing efforts later in the week. On Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, people are still focused on the holiday and the tasks associated with preparing for them. Any press releases you want to submit, advertisements you want to put out or deals you want to announce should be strategically planned so that they do not coincide with the holidays themselves. Use holiday search terms.  Improve your search engine optimization (SEO) this holiday season by getting involved with popular search engine terms for the holiday season. You can use tools like Google Trends to help figure out which search terms are most common for the season, and then figure out how to employ those for your business and industry. Be genuine. Be generous in your well-wishing for the holiday season. Let your customers, clients and employees know how much you appreciate them and that you hope they have a great holiday with their families. Send out little notes through the mail or email, and put up holiday wishes on your social media pages. This will improve your brand image and keep your company in people’s minds when they come back from the holiday. Assume people are listening.  Finally, just continue to go about your business as you normally would and assume that people haven’t tuned out for the holidays. The worst thing you can do is slow down for a week or two simply because many other people have closed up shop for the season. The best way you can ensure that you start off strong in January is to continue strong operations through the end of December. We hope these tips help you to find some success this holiday season and beyond. And if you need to explore your options for business equipment leasing in 2014 and beyond, don’t hesitate to contact Fidelity Capital.