Low Budget Q4 Marketing Strategies

August - the month of California sunshine, my mother’s birthday, the start of tomato season, and….planning for Q4 holidays. 

For those of you who sell wholesale, you’ve probably been talking about the holidays for months now. 

For all of you who sell direct to consumer now is a good time to start thinking about capturing more sales during the holiday season.

We’ve all seen the bigger budget holiday season offerings - special flavors that release in November and December, limited edition gift sets, and red and green packaging. 

If you are like most of my clients, that type of holiday offering is beyond your budget. But I do want to urge you to plan something special for this time of year when people are looking for unique and meaningful gifts for their loved ones. A bump in sales during Q4 can provide you with the cash you need in upcoming slower winter months. 

One of the major benefits of selling a value-added product is that you now have something people want to buy for other people, that they can ship to friends and family, that carries a label that can attract new customers. So don’t shy away from the biggest sales season of the year. 

Giftable. That’s the mantra for the season. Giftable. 

Here are some ideas for making your product offerings giftable on a more limited budget. 

CREATE GIFT PACKS

The idea behind a gift pack is that you bundle two or more of your products together in an attractive package. This creates something super giftable (and wrapable) for your customer and you end up selling 2+ items to your customer instead of one. The key when you are on a tighter budget is to keep the gift packaging clean & festive without eating up all the profit you should make on the product inside. 

One of my favorite solutions is using thick walled cardboard boxes with crinkle paper inside. A square or rectangle box screams GIFT! when displayed plus these boxes (technically called indestructo boxes) can also be shipped without putting them inside another box and they are environmentally friendly. You can even gift wrap them in holiday reminiscent wrapping paper for a little upcharge. 

A great way to display these is to create a stack of the filled boxes and place an open box in front of the stack so that customers can see the product inside. 

PRINT ORDER FORMS

Creating urgency to purchase is an effective marketing strategy which is often executed in misleading and manipulative ways. I’m personally into keeping the sound strategy and tossing out the shady methods. One way to do this in an in person sales or CSA setting is to create an order form for your holiday sales. Customers have to fill out and pay for their holiday purchases by a certain date. You then prepare them and have them available for pickup at your stand or include them in their farm box delivery.

You can make an order form easily with a Canva template. List all of your products and their pricing and have a place for people to fill out the quantities they are purchasing. Payment should be taken right away (this is a pre-order) which gives your customer a sense of wanting to order in time before you run out. An added benefit is that this strategy gives you a better understanding of how much product you need to wrap or box or bow for those holiday season sales. 

PUT A BOW ON IT

This was one of our inside jokes at the ranch, a derivation from the Portlandia Put a Bird On It. If you put a bow on a product during the holiday season, watch how much more quickly it sells. It’s a bit stunning, to be honest. 

Why? Here is my theory. Your customer is walking around with a list of people in the back of their minds that they want to buy gifts for this year. There are the obvious people that they know what to get and then there is the list (the teachers, hair stylists, boyfriend’s parents) that is more open ended. “Something cute and nice,” is what your customer is looking for to give these folks. When you put a bow on your product it's like it tickles the part of the brain with that list and the tickling produces the thought,”Oh! I could get them this.” 

But you don’t have to take on individually tying bows on cases of product which will take longer than you think. Opt instead for pre-tied bows like those metallic stretch loop bows you’ve seen on candy boxes. If you search for “stretch loop bows” or “pre-tied bows” on the internet you can find ones in satin, rafia, and even burlap.  

So what’s your next step? Pick one thing you are going to do this year to try and capture more holiday sales and try it out. And celebrate whatever uptick you see. Even a small bump in sales is a good start - repeat your strategy again next year and it will keep building as customers begin to think of you as a place to buy gifts. 

Cheers,

Ellen