Dan Kennedy – Holiday Swipe File

Dan Kennedy – Holiday Swipe File

What are you doing for the holiday weekend?

This weekend is Memorial Day weekend in the U.S. Swimming Pools open. Parades take place. People barbecue. Oh yeah, and there are summer sales.

Memorial Day weekend is the biggest sales event time of year until November’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Last year, retailers for clothes, appliances and cars offered significant discounts and it looks to be the case this year too.

Tying holidays to your marketing campaigns—especially a big holiday weekend like Memorial Day is a reliable, formulaic and effective way to stand out in a crowded marketplace and stimulate consumers to take action.

As a small business marketer, you can use holidays to keep your marketing interesting, boost your response, and even create better relationship with your clients, customers and patients. Here’s how:

1)      Enter the conversation already going on. What are people talking about around the water cooler this week? They are talking about their plans for the holiday weekend. When you use holidays as part of your marketing campaign, you use one of the most famous copywriting principles from Robert Collier of entering the conversation ALREADY currently occurring in your prospects’ or customers’ minds.

Grab your calendar and look for the holidays you know your customers will be talking about—then plan promotions around them.

2)      Create or strengthen your bond with your customers. When you have something in common with your customers, certain holidays can help nurture a stronger relationship with your prospects and customers.

Are you particularly patriotic or do you have a tie with the military you want your customers to know about? Choose holidays that will reflect that—such as Veteran’s Day, Independence Day and National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day.

Or have you noticed an affinity to Star Trek and a lot of Star Trek fans in your target market? You might try a promotion around “Captain Picard Day” or “First Contact Day” (a holiday celebrated to honor the flight of the Phoenix and First Contact with the Vulcans on April 5, 2063.)

Causes are another connection and there are holidays built around these as well. For example, May is ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or Lou Gehrig’s Disease) Awareness Month and Brain Tumor Awareness Month.

The idea here is to pick a holiday topic, even if it’s unknown, that will spark their interest because it’s a topic or cause they are interested in. There are holidays for almost anything you can think of, so the more you know about your customers, the more you can find holidays that will match their interests.

3)      Keep them interested. You’ve heard it said many times that people want to be entertained. Holidays can keep people interested and entertained.

GKIC member, Dr. Bergh shared in our July 2012 Swipe & Deploy File how he uses holidays for a highly successful referral program that sparked a 300% increase when he changed to using holidays which made his program more interesting. It’s something that keeps his clients excited and wondering what he will do next. Certain holidays have been so popular that his clients look forward to, and anticipate their return.  [Swipe & Deploy Files are included with every No B.S. Newsletter and showcase proven marketing pieces or campaigns for GKIC members to quickly, easily and “legally steal” to use in their own marketing. To receive the No B.S. Newsletter plus $633.91 worth of money-making information, click here.

One way to keep people entertained is to pick official (not made up) unknown holidays that are silly, bizarre, strange, or wacky such as International Audit Month, No Pants Day, National Dog Bite Prevention Week, or Lumpy Rug Day.

4)      Increase your revenue. It stands to reason if you can get more people to pay attention to, open and read your marketing, you’ll have more people come through your door, order your products, use your services and/or respond to your offer.

In our Ultimate Holiday Promotion Swipe File, we show real holiday promotions from business after business boasting impressive response. For instance, Ed Rush used holiday promotions to increase the number of people attending GKIC chapter meetings. He tripled his response immediately. Brett Fogle of Options University used a holiday promotion to more than double response, producing over $237,000 in revenue from a two-week promotion. Here’s something important to note about Brett’s promotion. He used the exact same sales letter and its offer a number of other times, without the holiday theme.  With the holiday theme, it more than doubled the number of registrations over his previous record.