B2B Holiday Marketing Sales Strategies to Succeed

It’s the holiday season. And you know what that means. The end of the year, a generally slower period at work, and lots of pie and hot chocolate. You’ve heard it before – B2B sales slow down during the holidays, while B2C sales speed up. Logically, it makes sense, but it doesn’t need to be the slow period you expect.

With great ideas and a plan, you can set yourself up for success and a strong start to the new year. You should be doing things like showing your clients and prospects you think of them as more than deals, and showing your employees that you value their hard work, especially during December.

The end of the year marks new beginnings and brings up emotions as families come together and memories are made and remembered. Make sure to humanize your sales and marketing efforts to align with the state of the world.

Why To Ramp up Sales and Marketing

Everyone knows marketing and sales efforts go hand-in-hand. While you should still be selling, scheduling demos, and more, you should also be running marketing campaigns during this time of year.

Marketing during the holidays can be really fun – Instagram and TikTok can be great places to create more holiday-themed relatable content about workplace culture during this time of year.

LinkedIn in December

When you are deciding where it’s best to focus your social selling efforts during the holidays, LinkedIn will be at the top of the list. While Instagram and TikTok are great places to market yourself to gain brand awareness, you’ll want to use LinkedIn to target specific people during the season.

Less Competition

Because so many businesses believe that there will be a slowdown, there will be a slowdown in sales attempts. This means there will be less competition for your team, especially in LinkedIn inboxes. There is less of a chance that your outreach gets lost in a sea of sales outreach.

Use automated outreach to ramp up your number of people contacted during this time to keep your pipeline full while you work on other things. You can even add a Holiday themed meme or gif to your messaging!

Set Yourself up for a Strong New Year

When people say “no” to buying your services or products because it’s the holiday season, you’re simply filling your pipeline for the new year. Salespeople will be able to reach out to those people come the new year, and will already have established rapport, which is one of the key sales tactics you need to close deals.

Make sure to start your year off by contacting the people you talked to in December who didn’t close. That way you can get a head start in ramping up those sales!

When you use HyperSphere, you can tag each conversation you have on LinkedIn so you will have your list of conversations to revisit easily accessible!

More Social Media Activity

More people are checking their socials during this time of year. People often forget that LinkedIn is a Social Media Platform. The rise in social media activity means that you should not put a pause on yours.

Make sure you post at least once a week, have your profile spruced up, and run automated messaging campaigns to get conversations started.

In addition to LinkedIn activity, the holiday season is also a great time to run holiday marketing campaigns on your other platforms. Post on your socials as much as possible to raise brand awareness.

This is a good time of year to post brand-aware content that does not directly attempt to sell. A great goal could be to make people feel positive when they see your content so that when you start selling again and are in their inbox, they associate your company with good feelings.

How to Help Boost Sales and Marketing

There are a ton of ways you can boost your sales and marketing efforts without adding stress and a million extra hours to your employees’ days. Here are two ways to ensure that your clients, prospective clients, and employees will all feel valued during the holiday season.

Send cards to clients and prospects

Whether it’s a card by snail mail or an E-card by email, send some cards to your current clients as well as people in your pipeline. It’s a good look that shows that you think about your clients as more than their business. You think of them as people.

Try to personalize these messages best to your abilities. Get account managers to write a short blurb or send a quick video using Loom, BombBomb, or Vidyard.

Reward your Team

Do all you can to make your marketing and sales team feel valued during this time. That can mean aligning the sales and marketing teams with company-wide bonuses, doubling commissions, giving gifts, extra vacation time, or cash incentives.

The more your employees feel valued, the harder they will work. So make sure to prioritize your employees’ happiness, especially during this time of year.

Ideas for End-of-Year Campaigns

There are tons of ways to market and sell during this time of year, but we’ve compiled some ideas to get your creative juices flowing. Some things to take into consideration when planning for this time of year are:

Your company’s services/product
Your company’s culture
Your buyer’s persona

Make sure you have a clear picture of these three things, and you’ll be ready to plan a great campaign for December.

End-of-Year Analytics

You’ve all seen the Spotify Wrapped and Apple Music Replay. Doing something similar to this for your clients can be a great idea. Try sharing analytics with some holiday graphics!

12 Days of Memes

Another great idea is 12 days of memes. Share one meme a day for the 12 days after Christmas to keep a constant flow of content on your pages.

Holiday Season Client Success Stories

Share client success stories around the holidays through a storytelling email campaign. This is a great way to showcase success while also highlighting the holiday season.

Planning Ahead

You should always follow a marketing calendar to make sure you are prepared as projects start up. These three ideas aren’t too time-consuming, so you can add them to your efforts even as the month is coming to its halfway point if your team has the time. End the new year on a high note!

HyperSocial can Help with all This and More!

Trying to ramp up your sales and need a helping hand? Check out our services here to learn more about how we can help.

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B2B Sales and Marketing During the Holiday Season