Five Hanukkah Marketing Tips

For businesses, Hanukkah is a great time to market your products and services because the holiday is celebrated during the year's hottest buying season. Successful Hanukkah marketing takes a well-thought-out, strategic approach because your competition is likely deploying their best ads and sales of the year at the same time. In order to get a leg up on the competition and enjoy the best sales of your year, you should implement the following five Hanukkah marketing tips.

1. Test multiple mailings first

If you send direct-mail postcards (or brochures, catalogs or flyers) to likely customers, it's a good idea to test multiple versions of your postcards on small sub-segments of your mailing list to determine which version performs best before you mail out to your entire list. You don't have to make measure changes between your versions – a simple headline change, image switch,or offer swap is all you need. It won't take long to figure out which has the best response rate from buyers, and you'll be able to accurately predict your return on investment for the entire campaign by utilizing this Hanukkah marketing strategy.

2. Hold a special sale

It goes without saying that deep discounts and freebies get the attention of holiday shoppers. But when you make your special sale fun and uniquely engaging for your customers, you can boost profits from your Hanukkah marketing. You might offer an additional discount to anyone who brings in a menorah, or give away dreidels to customers who spend $50 or more. Remember that the better your sale targets your audience, the more sales you'll make.

3. Get free publicity

Publicity stunts such as a huge lighted menorah or other attraction can earn passive media coverage, but you can also get free publicity by helping out in your community. Organize volunteers to help with a food drive or toy drive, or make a donation to a local charity for Hanukkah. Make sure the local newspapers, radio, TV stations and bloggers are on-hand for the event; or at the very least ensure that photos are snapped and sent to the proper people at these media outlets. When a third-party verifies that you are great, customers will have no qualms about making purchases from you.

4. Partner with others

You can add to your holiday take by partnering with non-competing businesses that share your customer base. One way to do this is to offer special discounts to customers of another company. Another way is to create a combo package in which two or three businesses profit from one sale (such as a Hanukkah getaway jointly offered by a hotel, a restaurant and a movie theater). You can also go in with other companies to share the cost of your Hanukkah marketing campaigns; for example, you could market to three times as many customers with one postcard mailing if you went in with two other companies.

5. Send a coupon for future sales

Hanukkah marketing shouldn't stop once a sale is made. As they say, a bird in-hand is worth two in the bush, and it is far easier to get a repeat sale from a customer than to get a new sale from a non-customer. That's why you should include a discount coupon or other special offer with customers' purchases to encourage future sales.