Business Growth Tip: Engage Customers with New Year Marketing

The skies over our heads were lit with celebratory lights in the early hours of the New Year. Businesses also partake in the fanfare of this ‘ushering into new things’, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Some host parties; others send out the obligatory ‘Happy New Year’ text messages and emails; and a few just roll on as though there’s been no significant turn of the calendars.

However your business opts to ride with the new year, it’s important to remember that there’s always an opportunity to keep it prominent in the minds of existing and potential customers. This is true even for the so-called slow month of January when the wheels of commerce seem to turn much slower than we would like. We can tap into the public’s joys and expectations for the next twelve months and market our products, services and expertise as need-to-haves in this new positive dispensation that they aim for.

Perhaps you already greet your customers with good wishes for the new year, verbally or via text (email and on your social media channels). How about taking this a few steps further and turning it into an actual conscious promotion of your business, with some proper trappings of a marketing strategy?

In this article, we’ll tell you how to make this happen. Whether you’ve been serenading clients with goodwill new year messages or just waiting for business to get up and run, you’ll find the following tips pretty useful.

Tips for New Year Themed Promotions

1. Shoot Out New Year Emails

We’re not talking about the dull, bland emails that read like a summons to a boring meeting. If you want your customers’ eyes to light up (or smile) on seeing your message, you’ll need to make it a short, nicely written piece of prose. Make it about recognizing their loyalty, and promise them a year of quality service (which you should be bent on delivering).

Remember to add some unique layout and structure where you can, to make the email look more vibrant. You can do this if you’re using email automation and customization tools.

If you’re sending out SMS, you’ll have less space and a limit on aesthetics, but you can still come up with something simple and genuine. But if you don’t do emails at all, you may want to consider using it this year. It could do wonders for your business. Here’s how to start off.

2. Run With the New Year Theme On Social Media

There’s more to this than putting up fancy digital banners on Facebook and Instagram (which you should probably do, by the way). You can place New Year themed messages throughout the first month. Your approach here should be to have more of these types of content at the start of the year and to let them tapper out in the last couple of weeks of January.

Apart from explicit posts celebrating the dawning of a new year, you could do something around new year resolutions. You could present some motivating goals for the coming months, or write something humorous about people’s attitudes to resolutions.

We have a few other suggestions for the sort of content you could use on social media, in the steps that follow.

3. Give Tips of Your Own

Many people have their year planned but need help with practical ways to achieve the goals they’ve set. Others just want a nudge to get them started with planning. They need tips. And you could be the one to provide them with the answers, especially if it’s about something you’re an expert at. This is where savvy content marketing comes in.

You can write blog posts on your website with hacks for reaching our milestones for the year, and share them on your social media platform, or you may share this sort of material from other sources instead. Just be sure that it’s something your potential or existing customer would find insightful and helpful.

The point of this (as with much of content marketing) is to let your customers see you as a go-to source for relevant solutions. After all, that’s what you’re in business for. And when they associate you with problem-solving, you earn their trust.

4. Announce Your Plans for the Year

You may choose to reveal your plans for the year in January or drop exciting hints instead. What you want to do with this is build a sense of expectation with your customers early on, which should make them stick around from the start and for longer.

Announcements may be made on all your contact points with the world beyond your workstation: word of mouth, social media, websites, email. If your plans are big enough, you might even have a newsletter about them sent to print media for publication.

5. Unveil New or Improved Products and Services

This is one sure way to start the new year with a bang. For one, it aligns well with the ‘new beginning’ buzz in the air at this time. Such unveilings tend to sail with the extra lift of season-specific emotion (as Christmas sales do).

This might imply that you’ve already had the product in the works in the year before. But if you haven’t you can always execute this in the future. Meanwhile, dropping announcements for what you do have lined up might be a fair substitute for now (see the preceding tip).

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ikenna-nwachukwu

Ikenna Nwachukwu holds a bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He loves to look at the world through multiple lenses- economic, political, religious and philosophical- and to write about what he observes in a witty, yet reflective style.

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