Round Out Your Holiday Campaign with These Tips for Small Businesses

Dear small businesses: consumers want to support you in a big way during the holiday season, and your campaign can make an equally big impact.    

As a whole, holiday spending is rising. In 2020, it increased 8.3% to a total of $789.4 billion. And it’s a new year to shine. In order to help you make the most of your advertising campaigns, we recently surveyed our listeners A18+ to get a sense of their feelings toward holiday spending and how they’ll dish out their dollars this season.

We found that 91% of our listeners have been supporting local brands in some way since the onset of the pandemic, and 76% think locally owned businesses need more support now than ever.

Armed with these insights, here’s what brands should pay attention to:

Use Small Business Saturday as Your Motivation

Thanksgiving weekend still remains a huge shopping weekend, and it’s no wonder each day gets its own nickname: Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday. This big spending trio of days is especially important for small businesses. Last year, Small Business Saturday grew to almost $20 Billion in reported spending and was the #2 biggest spending Holiday. 

Our listeners also like to shop small. We found that nearly 6 in 10 said they’re going to buy from small businesses during this holiday season, more so than big retailers. Not only that, 1 in 3 plan to shop on Small Business Saturday, which is an increase from 2020.

Since so many consumers do all of their holiday shopping during this weekend, make sure to mark your calendar and advertise leading up to these key dates.

Make Your E-Commerce Website the Best it Can be 

It’s no surprise that restrictions on in-store shopping led to an increase in online spending in 2020, but we’re also noticing this trend is continuing into 2021. In our survey, 60% of listeners said they’ve ordered from a local small business online or for curbside pickup this year.

Now’s a good time to take a look at your current website (or get one up and running!) and make sure that it’s optimized for SEO. After all, you want consumers to easily find your brand online. Once they’ve landed on your site, make sure they can access every part of it efficiently. A few quick tips: allow guests to check out without needing to create an account, offer crystal-clear shipping information (that means no surprise costs), and send a follow-up email if they leave items in their cart. And, of course, the user experience needs to be flawless on both desktop and mobile.

Here’s another push to make that website sparkle. We found that our listeners are receptive to digital ads on our platforms—in fact, 60% find that digital ads have driven or would potentially drive them to support local SMBs.

Start Holiday Advertising ASAP 

Last year, holiday shopping began earlier than ever, and brands began running their holiday campaigns as soon as October. Given the growth in holiday spending last year, we think this trend is here to stay.

At SXM Media, we're pros at putting a holiday plan into place. We can help you plan, produce, manage, and measure your campaign. With our rich first-party data, we find your audience, and hit them with an impactful message.

And if you haven’t caught on by now, we have tons of research data on our listeners that you can’t find anywhere else (like the fact that 7 in 10 listeners make an active effort to support local restaurants, and 6 in 10 support local retail stores—see? They’re all about shopping local).

Start rounding out your holiday advertising, and let's bring your campaign to the ears of the shoppers you want to reach. Ready to win over the holidays year after year? Talk to our sales team to learn more.

Source: Pandora Soundboard, 2021 SMB Study, A18+ (N=1,948), September 2021