Take The Long View with Your Advertising

If you are one of the businesses out there that rely on Christmas to go into the black, you'll soon be out of business. Holiday shopping has really changed over the years, as the recession has impacted the buying behavior around holidays. People are spending less for Christmas and around the holidays and opting to cocoon or wait for after-holiday sales to scoop up deals. It's absolutely critical to take the long view in your advertising campaigns to try to generate sales year-round during this recession.

Continue To Spend On Advertising

Businesses that are cyclical are going to make the mistake of saving all their pennies for an advertising campaign around the holidays only or of cutting back on advertising all together. Either way, the slow and steady route of creating sales campaigns year-round will provide more benefits than a hit-or-miss holiday promotion.

Benefits Of Year-Round Advertising

• Pinpoint Market Demand Better - When you commit to advertising year-round, you also commit to listening to your consumers and fine-tuning your products and services to the market demand. If you don't do this, it may be hard to really understand what your customers want when the holidays finally do come around.

• Time To Experiment - You can experiment with multiple formats throughout the year to find out what works well with your customers. Maybe you find that you get most of your sales leads on the Internet or on the radio. It's hard to know this unless you try it and test it out. If you wait until the last minute to swamp the airwaves around Christmas time when everyone else is also competing for attention, you'll have wasted valuable time.

• Better Advertising Rates - You can negotiate better deals with different publishing venues year-round than you can during the holidays. There is less demand and even publishers have to compete for advertising business if they want to survive this recession. Use that to your advantage by building a relationship with these publishers and negotiating a good price for now and later.

• Maintain A Year-Round Presence – “Out of sight, out of mind,” as the saying goes. The more you manage to stay in front of the consumer, the more likely they will come your way when they are ready to buy. If you do this with skill, you can even create a following of people who appreciate receiving your offers and discounts in email or snail mail marketing campaigns.

• Better Campaigns During Holidays – If you have managed to carefully cultivate the market during the rest of the year, you do stand a better chance of doing well around the holidays. People are more receptive to businesses that they have already purchased from and have less buyer resistance. An existing customer is infinitely easier to market to than a brand new customer. If you are promoting offers year-round, by the time Christmas rolls around, the relationship you have built throughout the year will produce results in the bottom line during the holiday season.

Carpe Diem - Sieze the day!

Matt Maré
http://www.mattmare.com/recession