This year has been unpredictable, if you hadn’t noticed. Businesses have been faced with one of the most challenging periods of time in recent history and it’s the same for customers too. With this in mind, it’s difficult to predict exactly what will happen with Christmas sales and consequently, post-Christmas sales too.
With unpredictability, it’s important to try and be agile and roll with the punches this year. Let’s take a look at how you can try and read the room with your post-Christmas marketing.
Unhelpful Research
You can look through plenty of reports that will tell you about all sorts of statistics about shopping habits this year, trying to predict exactly what British shoppers are going to do this Christmas and beyond, but keep track of your own numbers and metrics and try to cut through the noise.
The tier system in the UK and lockdown options means that research that purports to know how people will shop is even more dicey. At the moment, people’s attitudes and opinions on how they are going to interact with society and spend their money is so changeable. Surveys will most definitely generate answers from the public about speculative shopping behaviour, but whether those answers are actually worthwhile and worth shaping your campaigns and budgets around is debatable.
Monitor what’s happening with your business and try to assess what’s happening on the ground where you are.
One thing’s for sure, and a piece of research that stands the test of time that you can rely on is that discounts work! Where it makes sense for your business, offer attractive discounts for customers and test out what works and with which products.
How do you Feel?
It sounds strange at the moment, but anticipating the national mood is up in the air. Who’d have thought we’d ever think that about Christmas and post-Christmas, which usually give some similar shopping behaviours.
Try to think about how you personally have found this year, how you’re finding the Christmas period and what you’re thinking about 2021. Build some of these insights and moods into your product promotions, discounts and focus. You could use a bit of black humour in your marketing or focus heavily on the ‘treat yourself’ mantra and push the fact that we’ve all had a bad year and encourage customers to spend on themselves and others to cheer everyone up a bit. Use your own experiences to put yourself in the shoes of your customers – you’ll probably find your mood is pretty similar!
Combining a mixture of acknowledging this year has been really hard for everyone, using some emotive messaging to show we’ve pulled together and moved through it and using some hope and optimism to look forward could be a good bet, but as mentioned, using some humour and wry nods to all of this can be done effectively too.
It’s a tough one for marketers and businesses to get the tone right, but like everything else, embrace the unpredictability of it all and keep an eye on what unfurls.
For some extra marketing advice and help, get in touch with us here at DOWO.