The holiday season is the most joyful time of the year for most human beings – who like family dinners, gift distribution, ugly sweatshirt, food overdose, and their drunk uncle who makes dad jokes. Even in the online world, retailers are breaking records year over year, and particularly this winter due to the COVID-19 social distancing measures. Guess who are the only ones who eat their Xmas hats? You’re right, B2B sales and marketing people.
Let’s be honest: very few professionals have time or patience to deal with implementing a new product or software in the middle of this madness and/or are excited to spend money right before Q4 is closing. That said, there are some ways to keep generating leads despite the circumstances. And this is where marketing and sales join forces more than any other time in the year – or maybe not, but it sounds dramatic.
So, how can we generate leads in this time of (B2)business desolation?
Customize your marketing and sales materials
It sounds obvious but it’s not that simple to apply. You have to customize most of your materials to be in the vibe of the season. It doesn’t mean you need to put a bunch of reindeers hugging elves in your email signature – weird idea, sorry for that – but rather that you should be sensitive to the mindset of your prospects.
From your newsletters to your landing pages, sales emails, social media content, and even your website (go easy with the last one) make sure to add a subtle touch that resonates with the current climate. It can be a greeting line at the end of your sales email, a decoration on your landing page, or even, if you succeed to book an actual meeting with a prospect, you can customize your demo to include a nice word for the client inside your product.
Make some email marketing magic
It won’t be respectable of you not to send a greeting email to commemorate major holidays. In fact, there are tons of creative ideas celebrating the end of the year, Xmas, Hanukkah, etc, which you can use to remind your subscribers to come and visit your website. Here are some of them:
- Greetings! We just mentioned this tip, but in case you’re the kind of person who skims articles online – no hard feeling, we do the same – here’s a friendly reminder.
- Year in review: The end of the year is the perfect opportunity to brag a bit about your achievements while showing some appreciation to your community.
- Free feature: Whoever is your client, offering them a product-related gift is always a nice way to make them use your platform. For instance, you can open a feature (usually paid) for a limited time like Zoom did in the example below.
- Discounts: “Holiday sales! 50% off” – How many emails like that did you get lately? Yeah, a f**king lot. It may be a little annoying, but it works.
- Guide: Internet people love curated content. Send your contacts a list of free tools that can help them to grow their business. Helping never hurts. Except for Hodor.
- Free eBook: You know how easy it is to collect leads with a good eBook. Design one relevant to your audience that celebrates the season, and start bringing the leads on.
Use the power of social media
Social media is one of the most powerful tools to communicate with your audience – and expand it. By sharing content on social platforms, you can bring traffic (and leads) to your website, collect valuable feedback from your community, and position your business as an expert in your field. But there is a catch: During the holiday season is (almost) no-one gives a sh*t about hardcore professional content – expect for you, glorious reader. To stand out on people’s feeds, creativity and timing are key.
In general, it’s a good practice to appeal to emotions while sharing content and advertising. At this time of the year, it’s critical. Also, you should ensure that your content is anchored in the atmosphere of the holidays in order to catch the attention of the holiday-minded social users. Share your company resolutions for the new year, send your best wishes to your followers, if you have a special sale, push it a bit on your social media, and of course, don’t forget to share with the world your genius blog articles.
Tailor your blog content for the season
See what we did here? We share a time-sensitive-not-too-heavy-article that (we hope) will be useful to our readers. We’re not trying too hard to push our interactive product demo software (you know, Walnut, the killer platform to create sales demos – damn it! it’s stronger than us) or to write super complicated content that will make you sweat by the ears.
You can write about pretty much any topic related to the season on your blog, that’ll bring value to your customers: from gift ideas to fun holiday-related showcases from your industry, and tips to manage work-life-holidays balance. The only thing to keep in mind is that your content will need to make sense within your company’s DNA. For instance, if you’re selling CRM software, you’d rather write about clients’ retention during the holiday than about the dilemma of putting red sox on the chiminea when you’re a Yankees’ fan. You got the point.
That’s it for today. Wishing you the best holidays folks!
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