Why you should not offer big sales during the holidays

Welcome to Boostly Podcast Season 10 Episode 7. This is a recap of my Facebook live video where I talked about big sales during the holidays.

Here's the audio for this episode:

Here's the video for this episode:

Timestamp

01:10 Consider your Black Friday deals
03:20 Why you should not get involved in holiday sales
05:00 What you can do instead
07:30 Work with local businesses
08:30 The main takeaway

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Transcript from the Episode

Today, I'm encouraging everybody to think again, before you go and do your black Friday deal. Now it doesn't matter if you're watching this live with me or if you're watching back on the replay, Black Friday, Boxing Day sales, there's always some form of then coming up. But most importantly, I'm recording this a week before Black Friday sales probably begin and you're going to be inundated with hundreds of emails, messages, Facebook ads, you name it, trying to get you to buy their products. And most importantly, as a business owner, you're going to be tempted to do a sale yourself. Whether it's something that you've already maybe planned a couple of days ago, or maybe it's something that you're going to go ahead and do.

Why you shoud not get involved in holiday sales

Number one, specifically when it comes to accommodation, just imagine if you're a guest, you know you're a guest and you've booked to go and stay property you've handed money over. And and literally a week or two weeks down the line, they start posting upon social media where you can get exactly the same day. But 50% discount, you're going to be a little bit annoyed, and the customer is going to get a bit pissed off at this as well.

And this is literally why I see so many people encouraging and I've seen it on social media this week I've seen on Instagram, I've seen so many people promoting their Black Friday sales already for a product that you could literally a week ago and get at the same price. And if you are constantly doing it, then what you're doing is you're training your followers training your customers, your guests, that they shouldn't book with you any of the time but they should wait for the holidays, wait for the sales because you're going to adopt the sales approach. So it's going to harm the long term ramifications of your business, you're not going to get people wanting to book with you in January or February because they know if they wait a couple of weeks, you may be doing a spring sale at Easter sales. You know Valentine's sale, you know, which which is something that you don't want to be getting into.

So don't train your audience, train your customers that you're only here to offer major discounts. And also as well. Don't try and offer something out a week ago with exactly the same price. It just doesn't bode well.

What you can do instead

If you're a property manager, you may have a new unit coming up that needs bookings that you want to show it off, maybe this is going to be one of your signature properties. Or you may have closed down for most of the year, for what for whatever reason, COVID or whatever you're going to be looking to reopen in January and February. And you know, you haven't got any bookings, and you want to relaunch it, maybe you've redecorating, maybe you've changed the building around or whatnot. So for a launch of a new unit, or for larger, something new, maybe I've seen a couple of people in a team Boostly, they are creating cookbooks. And they're creating cookery classes and whatnot, because this is like a new pivot for their business.

So a really good thing that they could be doing for Black Friday could be opening up early applications for the cookery course, I'll be given a sneak peek, a heavily discounted rate on the cookbook. So we can use black Friday and this and the sale of an app for the launch of a product or a service for accommodation. So that's a good time to do it.

Those of you that are thinking last minute, you just sort of get that FOMO. And you just think I'm just going to put a black friday offer out there, you haven't planned it properly. And it's something that somebody could have literally purchased a week ago, you're going to annoy a lot of people. So please, please don't do that.

Work with local businesses

The other instance where you could do this could be where you team up with other local businesses in your area. So you offer the accommodation you could partner with, with a local restaurant or something to offer, maybe a gift voucher or something, maybe there's local chocolate here, you could partner with them and build up a little hamper. thing, yes, something like that, you could definitely sell as a bundle and put it up for a black Friday offer because again, you're going to be supporting local business, which is really a real big movement going towards this supporting local businesses. You build an up good local relationships with other businesses, but also as well, it's something that you couldn't offer a week before. So we can partner up and do a partnership on them, which is again, something that I think a lot of people doing online, and they've done it really really well.

Main takeaway

Don't get sucked in with the FOMO don't get sucked in with the peer pressure thinking that you've got to do a black friday deal. Make sure you plan it properly. don't offer something that literally a guest could have got a week go for exactly the same price. Try and create something that's new or create a service to your users have the chance to launch a new product and if you as well trying to partner up and build up some local relationships.

Before you leave

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