Good morning and welcome to the Monday morning marketing podcast. I'm Esther.
And I'm Melanie.
And today we're joined by Amanda Webb of SpiderWorking.Com. Welcome, Amanda.
Hello. I'm so excited to be here, having listened to your podcast in the past.
Yeah, it's great to have such a popular fan, in it?.
Well, we're really excited to have you with us. And today we're talking about seasonal selling. now I know it's not December. So why is it important to talk about seasonal selling now and not just keep Christmas in December?
Well, I'm from a personal point of view, you probably want to create Christmas in December, but from a marketing point of view, you've got to plan. You've got to plan in advance. So what can happen, and I know does happen to a lot of businesses, it gets mid-November and you go, oh, Christmas is coming up. I've got to do some marketing for that. And then what you have to do is you have to come up with your plans. You have to go and create your content. You have to fulfil orders, deliver stuff to go through that hectic Christmas time, all in the space of like six weeks, which is a nightmare. Right. You can't do it well and you end up being just totally exhausted, totally exhausted. And then you know what happens in January, you go, well, that was an OK Christmas. But what if I started my planning a little bit earlier on? Maybe I could have done my content properly. Maybe I could had a proper plan in place that would drip more sales, would have had more happy customers. So if you start, I'm even kind of thinking you should have started a month ago. But it's OK. You still got time. He's got time.
So don't panic.
Yeah, exactly. You're going to be less stressed. You're going to be able to spend your Christmas period doing what you're good at, which is delivering your product or service. And in the new year, you'll be able to see that you had a plan in place. You know what didn't work from that plan? You know what did work from that plan so that next year you'll be even more prepared. So start thinking now. Start putting all your dates in the calendar, start thinking about what content projects you're going to do to try and promote your business. Start building your audience with that. I could keep going overstock. You should probably go first.
I have one actually. Does business to business and business to consumer have different types of strategies for Christmas?
Not necessarily so, I suppose. Are you selling something? Have you got something that you're selling for Christmas? Because I haven't, but I do have things I sell in the New Year, so I still would be planning ahead with that. But when you're building your strategy, it comes down to the same building blocks. No matter whether you're a business, business, business, consumer, whatever your business does is some key things that you would always think about. So if you're not selling anything at Christmas, that's fine. Maybe you don't want to compete in that mad Christmas market, but maybe you've got something going on in January when it's a little bit quieter that you can start planning for now.
OK, and how about the strategy is mostly written down, I assume so. Is there any sort of cost to applications or can you just do it with sheets of paper or Excel charts? What's easiest?
You can just write it down on a piece of paper. You can use Trello. I use Trello for... Which is it's a bit like an index card planning tool and you have like a board where you pin your virtual index cards and you can add due date. So each little task within your bigger project has that. I'm actually on video with Esther and Melanie now so they can see in the background my second favourite planning tool, which is Post-it notes, which I always have Post-it note plans like I have. This is colour coded. I have a beautiful is beautiful. If only you could see
We took a screenshot to share it
And let us know how you keep them stuck up, mines had come down.
I'm using it's a foam whiteboard which I have. Yeah. So they're opened up on that. So that's, that's kind of I would it's very similar to Trello, so I would have a Trello board which has more information on it than you could possibly put on Post-it notes. But my Post-it notes remind me of the tasks that need to be done. What I like is get my big marker. I just did this yesterday, said nothing is ticked off and get my big marker and taking off the Post-it notes went away satisfied. But you do really need to break it into those tasks. And Trello really helps you with that.
Yeah, and like you were saying, you know, it's it would be different for B2B as opposed to B2C, but even for those who are selling a physical product, you can't leave it all the way up to December for your marketing because there's postage dates, there's, you know, international dates. It's like I think it's the end of November to post to other countries, which just brings it. And I know of businesses who start their Christmas marketing in July, which as a consumer is really annoying because my Facebook feed, my Twitter feed gets filled up with Christmas stuff and I'm going, no, turn off, turn off, stop following. You know, how do you get over that?
So I suppose. Yeah. Oh, yeah, you can be for things you can be doing. Now, first you've got your planning, right. So that's important. You need to know who you want to who are your customers and then you need to start building your audiences of those customers. Now, you're not mentioning Christmas that you're producing content that's going to attract the right people and your social media onto your mailing list, onto your website, because once you've got those in place, when it comes to the Christmas season, you've got your captive audience. So not only should you be building them, maybe you've got loads of followers somewhere already. You need to make sure engaging as many of those as you can so that you're already on their mind. So if they're reading a blog post from you every week about like I have a customer that does jewellery, she produces a blog post a month about questions people have about her jewellery, how she produces it, the process of doing it. You know, how all sorts of useful information, if they're reading that all the way up to Christmas, where are they going at Christmas to buy? They're going straight to her, right, but she's not going to mention the C word until probably November. I think, you know, it's kind of agreed in Ireland at least, that after Halloween to start talking about Christmas.
Yeah, I can cope talking about Christmas at the same time, frankly, just on a personal level,
I absolutely love Christmas. I absolutely love it. Like Brown Thomas opened their Christmas shop the other day, and that's a clever marketing strategy itself. You know, the fact that it gets on the news every single year when they open their Christmas shop because it's so early. And this year it got in the news because they opened it a bit later because of the lockdown.
So a different strategy. Plus, they do their windows.
Just an amazing job.
Yeah, that's all the visuals and the graphics, you know, and all the imagery that people want to see. And that's what they'll be sharing and talking about It's like the John Lewis advert, you know, every Christmas they seem to come out with something and not just them. There's other ones, you know, but they all seem to compete over who has the most, like, heart pulling or funny or whatever. And it's going to be weird this year. You know?
That's a really good point, actually, because, at the end of the day, the people who listen to this podcast are going to be small or sole traders, small business owners or songwriters. And they don't have the budget, the TV commercials, and some of them won't have, you know, price locations on high streets. So what can they do that will be different to the competitor,
I suppose, is they don't need to have that budget to do that because they, imagine how many customers, cats just come into the room, by the way. You've heard that. How many customers does John Lewis need in order to turn a profit and what they spend? It's a lot. So first, you don't need to worry that you don't have that budget. Secondly, when you mentioned the Brown Thomas window, actually, it just occurred to me that that's with massive every year and everyone's crowded around to look at it. That's not going to be the case this year. How are they going to translate that online? That's going to be.
That's going to be a tricky one.
If you're a small business, you just need to, if you're a one person business, I think your personality is key. You need to start looking at your personal brand as part of your business. So start looking at that now, developing it. Make sure people are getting to know the face behind your business. When I first started out, it was really popular to kind of lie about the size of your business. So, you know, it's like we and you'd always be behind a logo. Right. But now people want to know who they're doing business with, particularly if it's a small business. You know, there's all sorts of strategies big businesses can use to get that personal touch. But the advantage we have is it's passed back and they don't waste your time chatting to everyone that you can online, which is lovely, but you really need to get exactly the right people. So, you know, it's all very well attracting hundreds of people, thousands of followers. But unless those are people that are going to potentially buy from me or people that are going to amplify your message to the people that will buy from you, you're wasting your time. So finding a small niche of something that you do exceptionally well and the right people that want that thing will work exceptionally well. So that's one advantage a small business has. I think you don't need to spend. I would put aside some money for ads because really, if you're working yourself really hard, you know, rather than just spending a little bit of money on ads, you have to work 50 times harder, which, you know,
because also in previous years there were the craft fairs and there were the small marketing fairs and stuff. So, you know, everybody's going to be online now or everybody should be online now anyway. But how do you get seen above everybody else? That's going to be the other, you know, sticking point.
You have to be creative. One of the things I'm really excited about and I'm really hoping I'm going to see a lot of small businesses doing this is kind of online auctions. So doing a Facebook live or depending where your audience is, whether it's Twitter or LinkedIn, YouTube and actually selling directly to your customers and making that a big event. So if you were used to doing all those profits for the money that you spent, getting the tables at the carfare, put that together, put together a strategy to build up to that event so that you make sure that lots of people turn up, put together your budget into both your ads. And if you can afford someone to do a bit of work for, you might be Melanie doing your social media posts. You know that that can help.
And Amanda doing your ads.
And Esther doing your website,
I would take that money and make this big event might be something special that your customers want to know about. Make sure the world knows it's going to happen. And that could be really effective, really. Your business out there before you may even get sales beforehand, but if you say, well, there's going to be a discount on the day, doesn't have to be a big discount, something extra that you get on the day. Yeah, if you do my online auction, I think that could work exceptionally well. And I'm really excited to see some businesses take this up. So if you do, let me know.
Yes, I guess this is what I'd like to hear about this as well.
Yeah. Be great. And well, what about. I was just looking through because you wrote a blog about this recently, didn't you, Amanda? You wrote it. I think it was back in July, even read the blog about holiday marketing and some top tips on how to succeed. But and we were talking just before we came on about. I've well, I've been seeing a lot of people putting together Advent calendars, a lot of marketers putting together top tips and top things like is that just because I'm in that zone that I see them either way with those also work for, you know, what's your opinion on that? Is that a good strategy or that's just that.
I think it's going to. If you planning out really well now, so I'm going to keep saying the same thing over and over again, and you have like what do you want to get out of that? What is it that you want to get out of your 30 days of tips? Is it just 24 days, sorry, what is your goal out of that? Is it to build your audience? If so, you know, that's really a legitimate goal. Don't let people tell you that you know it isn't. That's a legitimate goal. But then you should set yourself some goals around that, you know, how much do you want to build your audience? Who is your audience? Which is the hardest question to answer. Everyone always gets it, but it's also the most important thing. Instead of going and writing a blog post or making a video go work out, it's hard work, but it's going to inform everything else. So those are two things you want to know. Who are your audience? How how much you want to write, what sort of content is going to appeal to them, but still have some relevance to what you do. So, you know, I put a picture of my cat on Facebook yesterday. It got more likes than anything I've ever had. I mean, I love her life, but she's not the cutest cat. She is, like, adorable. But you wouldn't really capture that from the photo. So but don't be tempted to do that because it is tempting to put a picture of your cat up. So really, what map out what sort of content do they like watching videos, listening to podcast with images, you know, or maybe you would put a mixture of the NCAA reaching a lot of people. Yeah, sure. It's really good. So they're going to want to see the next day's worth. Yeah. And the third thing is you can't rely on the Facebook algorithm or the Twitter algorithm or the LinkedIn algorithm to deliver it every day, although certainly for three at a time or none at all. So maybe start building an email list and say, I'm going to do this for Advent, 2048 advent you'll get 24 emails over 24 days somewhere. You can unsubscribe afterwards. But, you know, if you subscribe, I'll send you a link every single day. And that could be a more engaging way to do it and maximise your reach.
I was going to ask you about email essentially and about lead magnets, because that would be a really handy way to initially give away some of your knowledge or your details about your products or services and then reward that person with a second lead magnet that then takes you on to possibly purchasing something, your product or your service. So how many lead magnets do you think people need to prepare for their campaign?
I would go one at a time. So I've got a lot of lead magnets by promote one at a time just so as not to confuse myself with anything else. So yeah, lead magnets are exceptionally effective at building your email audience, but you need to make sure that lead magnet is right for getting the audience that you want. Again, I could send out a lead magnet with pictures of my cats, but I know some of those people might have a business that won't get pictures of cats, but most of them are just going to be cat lovers. So that's not going to work. And I'm also a big fan of creating something really epic as your lead magnet. You know, I have lots of little checklists and things I give away, but my key lead magnets I put a lot of time and effort into. I'm currently working on my 2021 digital marketing strategy workbook. Which should be out at the beginning of November, which is replacing my current lead magnet, which is a masterclass, so it's an hour long video. It took me a long time to put together, it's fully edited with tutorials and everything. But I'm a big fan of doing something big because just the checklist isn't really telling me. Are those people really interested in what I'm doing? So I you know, you wouldn't want to do too many at once, but I would always have something on the go, lead magnet wise and just for GDPR reasons, just in case anyone's going. I thought you couldn't do lead magnets anymore. Just make sure that you have a checkbox where people can choose to subscribe to your newsletter. So my lead magnet will usually come with an email sequence that's attached to it. So you get the lead magnet, then you might get a tutorial on something, then you might get another helpful video on something, and then you get a sales post and then they go. Then they go and forget. Whereas if I take the box to join my newsletter, which approximately 50 percent of the people sign up for my late magnet's day, that means I can keep writing them. So I haven't just got that one chance to sell to them, which is really important if you're B2B as well. I have people buying from me now that signed up to my email list four years ago. So it's really important to write that list.
I'm one them.
What? Have you signed up for that or are you're buying from her?
4 Years ago I bought products from Amanda as well. So, you know, it's this is the important thing. The Golden Nugget, I reckon you've just dropped just now at the end about the lead magnets and email lists. People think they're dead because GDPR is not the case at all.
And I let in complicated, but it's not the case. So that means less people are doing it, which is good for your business, because if you do it, then there's less competition.
And I love the fact that Amanda has managed to talk about a lot of our previous blog sorry, podcasts, episodes that we have already talked about lead madnegst we've already talked about the importance of planning, the importance of getting your online avatar, you know, your your persona, your buyer persona ready. So we're doing, you know, listen to us. What we are doing it right. And, you know, Amanda's just told you that as well, you know, so go back, go through all the other previous episodes. Well, and let's go back to those
we have one more thing to plug, haven't we, Esther? And that's the fabulous festive marketing masterclass with Spider working Amanda Webb. Tell us all about it. How can we learn more
That's my current lead magnet, if you want to market your business for Christmas and you've got a taste today and you go, oh, yeah, I really should do something. Don't wait, don't wait any longer and do my free master class, which I will ask for an email address. You will get an email sequence. You want me to subscribe to my newsletter and I should take the box at spiderworking.com forward slash festive. And what you get is instant access then to the one hour master class plus a workbook. Plus we talked about Trillo, a Trillo template. So you've got everything in place to get your marketing going now. So go ahead and sign up to that. Let me know how you get on with it. Let me know if you heard about it on this podcast.
Yes, please. Yeah. Do that.
Yeah, and that's great. And Amanda, we actually met when you were speaking at, I want to say women's inspired network. I can't actually remember where it was.
It was.
But it was, wasn't it? And you were a fabulous speaker on stage, and I'm sure you're from the speaker virtually as well. But you are available for virtual speaking events. So they should get in touch with you definitely. And get you booked in, because Amanda is just full of useful information and Top Tips and everything else
And have digital coffee on a Friday as well.
I guess I should have mentioned that, shouldn't I?
But get signed up to her email list. It really is very, very useful. I'm sure I'm on it too. So that's it for today. Guys, thanks very much for joining us. Connect with us, connecting with Amanda and we'll hear from you soon, bye-bye
Bye.