December Marketing To Do List
December is such a fun time to lead a small business. We’re seeing so many customers come through the doors excited to purchase gifts for their friends and family, or just to celebrate the season. Plus we get to start planning ahead for the new year a little earlier than everyone else.
This month reflects those vibes with your marketing tasks, asking for feedback on their positive experiences with you, and thinking ahead to spring promotions. It includes some of our usual monthly tasks, but also some new fun tasks, enjoy!
60-Minute Marketing Tasks
Review Sales Numbers and ROI
While not technically marketing, you need to have a firm grasp on your sales numbers in order to track the return on your marketing investment. Knowing what categories outperformed goals, and which events sold out the quickest will help you strategize what to lean into or out of in the coming months. While you may have a sense of this anecdotally, we prefer the hard data because sometimes we can be surprised by the numbers.
Ask For Ratings And Reviews
In today’s world where ads are the least trusted source for consumers, and word-of-mouth reigns supreme, you need to have a robust review cache to prove you’re awesome. Even if you have an automated review request email campaign, you can still make a plan to invite customers to leave you reviews through other means. You can post on social media, ensure there is a link on your website, or remind folks after they complete an in-person transaction.
Check Your Automated Email Campaigns
If you’ve set up transactional and automated email campaigns like order confirmations, abandoned cart reminders, and review requests like we mention above, you may want to check in on them to ensure they are functioning properly, and are an accurate and fresh representation of your brand. Are there other automations you can add while you’re at it?
Prep For Spring Promotions
You may not be feeling the spring vibes as we get buckets of snow in December, but now’s the time to brainstorm ideas for spring events, sales and product launches. Build your ROI models, set up photo shoots for anything new, design graphics and write copy for your webpages, emails and social media ads. Think about themes like spring clean ups, a lively refresh, spring cleaning and planting.
30-Minute Marketing Tasks
Check In On Your Competitors
As you’re wrapping up next year’s strategic planning, it’s a great time to spy on your competition. Are there things they tried that you think you could do better? Or maybe they tried and it didn’t work out for them so you don’t think you need to test that tactic. Are there events they hosted, products they featured, or social media trends they did well that might be worth iterating on? Be sure to investigate their website, social media, and email marketing too. Once you have a good picture of what everyone did this year, try to see where there are gaps and where your business might find an opportunity to stand out in the niche. Even if you choose not to steal any of their ideas, having an understanding of where they are focused can help you brainstorm your own ideas to market your business next year.
Social Media Prep
We like to batch our social media work because otherwise it’s constantly looming over us like “I gotta post something but I have no ideas. Okay, now I have an idea but I need to film it or take the photo. Ahh, I forgot writing captions is so hard.” Just make time to sit down and do two weeks of planning all at once. Then schedule them out so you don’t have to worry about it. Of course, if something fun and spontaneous comes up, go ahead and post that, but if nothing does, you won’t go completely silent in the meantime.
Peek At Your Paid Ads Account
If you have one, check your Google Ads account performance at least every other week. You can add irrelevant keywords to your negative keyword list, and make any necessary changes to your daily budget and cost per click. Or perhaps you just wrapped up a campaign and want to analyze the results to see what you want to test next. We personally check in more often than this, but we know you’re busy so don’t forget to log in every once in a while so things don’t go off the rails.
Send Your Monthly Newsletter
Even if you have awesome email automations set up, you still likely have cool things to share with your customers at least once a month. We recommend having a newsletter template that you just have to duplicate, fill out with the latest news and send. Quick and easy!
Update Your Team
Check in with your staff to make sure everyone is on the same page regarding promotions, upcoming events, and priorities for marketing and sales at least monthly. This could be that you have an author reading coming up, a new seasonal beer release, or a social media campaign where you’re asking folks to take photos in your shop. Ensuring your staff is aware of what’s going on will help them best serve your customers.
5-Minute Marketing Tasks
Share To Stories
While you scheduled your social media content in advance, you can’t quite share your content to stories before it’s live. This feature may be coming soon on Instagram, though! For now, it’s a good idea to log into each of your social media accounts daily to share your content to social media, reply to comments and direct messages, and scroll and engage with other content for a few minutes. This tells the algorithm that you’re active and they should continue displaying your content to your audience.
Add To Your GBP
Look through the last week of posts on your social media and choose the one that got the most engagement or the most important one and share it on your Google Business Profile as a post. This keeps that profile fresh and signals to anyone who finds you that way that you are popular and worth a trip.
Check That You’re Open
When You Say You Are
Especially this time of year, you may decide to alter your business hours to reflect the holidays. Be sure to check your Google Business Profile, Google Maps, directories, and social media profiles to ensure your hours are correct and share when your hours are going to change for holidays or other reasons.
As always, we try to keep this work to 10 hours a month or less so you can focus on other aspects of your business. If you want support in getting all this done or strategizing for next year, we’d love to help you!