Implementing Thanksgiving marketing ideas online can significantly boost a small business’s visibility and sales. It capitalizes on the festive spirit, encouraging customer engagement and loyalty through themed promotions and content. This strategy also taps into the increased holiday shopping traffic, potentially attracting new customers and enhancing brand recognition during a key retail period.
It’s that time again, and Thanksgiving is just around the corner.
This time of year is all about spending time with family and friends and enjoying great food, but it’s also a great opportunity for businesses to attract more customers. Black Friday and Cyber Monday have become huge shopping events, and Thanksgiving marketing is a great way to take advantage of all that hype.
People often wait for these events to maximize their savings and get the best deals, so if you can stand out from other businesses by offering special opportunities that are unique and exciting, you’re sure to attract new customers.
This article has gathered eight Thanksgiving marketing ideas that attract more customers.
Thanksgiving Marketing Ideas
Whether you offer products or services, deploying a Thanksgiving marketing campaign can make all the difference between customers finding you and customers finding your competition.
We recommend A/B testing several ideas and analyzing the results for the best results. It’s an ongoing process, but it’s sure to illuminate what works and doesn’t work for your business. This is critical because it helps provide insight regarding where you should spend your marketing budget. It also helps reveal which channels will provide the best results during this time of year.
For example, if you sell products on your website, you might find that running Google ads for ecommerce produces more sales than running Facebook ads for ecommerce.
If, however, you’re an addiction treatment center, you may find that focusing on the social media aspects of your drug rehab marketing may provide a better way to share a warm message with your audience than focusing on your local SEO efforts.
It’s all about testing the market from your position and honing your marketing efforts during the holiday season.
Here are eight Thanksgiving marketing ideas to help you get started.
1. Send Personalized Deals to Customers via Email
It’s Thanksgiving – so give thanks! Especially to your best customers, or any of your customers on a mailing list. Use the opportunity to send them personalized messages and notify them of your current and upcoming catalog, as well as ongoing promotions.
Larger businesses can utilize mail management software like Mailchimp to send out thousands and thousands of personalized messages during Thanksgiving, so you don’t have to go through the legwork of writing each one yourself.
2. Create a Thanksgiving Promo
Keep it simple – in most cases, the best bang for your buck will be a promo code, sale, or discount themed around Thanksgiving, with Thanksgiving-related messages, visual branding, social media posts, and lots of little cartoon turkeys. Or, you can use the opportunity to…
3. Prepare Your Audience for Black Friday (and Cyber Monday!)
Outside of turkeys and cranberry sauce, Thanksgiving is known for one particular thing, and that’s the Friday right after Thanksgiving – also known as Black Friday. Black Friday (and the ensuing Cyber Monday) is a massive shopping event, and one both retailers and shoppers wait all year for. That means you’ll need to be ready – and so should your customers.
If you’re a retailer in any capacity, consider taking the time around Thanksgiving to pump out updated Buyer’s Guides and blogs dedicated to providing customers with information surrounding items in your niche and industry.
An electronics store might want to release an updated guide to buying and selecting the right GPU for a new computer in a post-crypto marketplace or draw traffic by creating a PS5 live ticker that updates to notify subscribed readers as to when and where the hotly-anticipated console is available.
4. Create Relevant Thanksgiving Content (Based on Your Business)
Not every business is in the market for Thanksgiving-themed content – but you can get creative with it and see where you end up. For example, an auto-detailing shop might want to think about making a TikTok about Thanksgiving- or even Holiday-themed joke cars, or a blog post about simple tricks to deck out your ride for this year’s fall season.
Other than silly or potentially relevant Thanksgiving content (like writing about keto-friendly or low-calorie Thanksgiving recipes as a fitness app), you can also use the opportunity to produce content geared towards preparing your readers or viewers for the upcoming winter season – because it’s late November, that can mean anything from making your pool winterproof to a homeowner’s guide to winter pest control. The possibilities are endless!
5. Create a Limited Thanksgiving-themed Product
Are you a custom ceramics business? Why not a special Thanksgiving-themed pumpkin bowl or vase? Or a skull mug?
Event-limited products are a great way to drive sales, especially among returning customers who have a bit of a collector’s bone in their body. Die-hard fans of your brand or product will want to get their hands on items that are guaranteed to go away (so be sure to develop a new Thanksgiving-themed item each year!) and it’s a new way to introduce your product to a fresh audience.
6. Plan a Giveaway Campaign
Another way to highlight the spirit of generosity is to plan a giveaway. Giveaways are a classic in marketing – pick a few items your audience might be interested in (including some of your own, but with an extra incentive for the Grand Prize, like a new TV or a smart kitchen appliance), create a giveaway campaign based around online engagement (like retweeting, subscribing to the YouTube page, and leaving a comment on Facebook), and pick the winners from a pool of participating contestants.
While this is little more than a ploy to drive engagement artificially by dangling a carrot on a stick, it does work to get people interested in your products and services if they were already in the market for them – and the extra engagement leads to more traffic on your social media pages and online links, which translates into more eyeballs on your products, and a higher likelihood of landing on a potential lead’s radar. In other words, it’s all about getting the foot in the door.
Utilizing YouTube subscriptions or page likes as a requirement to join is another way to land a future customer, even if they aren’t interested in your content or services/products at the moment.
7. Give Thanks to Your Great Staff
Why not highlight the people who make it all possible? Consumers love a company that puts its workers first, and one great way to show that you care about your people is by singing their praises and showing customers how they’re contributing to your business.
You could even turn it into a long-form campaign, highlighting a different co-worker each day (with their permission) via a dedicated social media post, or a heartfelt public thank-you note.
The point of this marketing campaign is to elicit good will and garner sympathy, but it’s also to take the time to genuinely let your colleagues know how much you appreciate them, particularly if you’re a smaller branch, or a small business altogether.
Smaller businesses not only have the luxury of having fewer people to thank, but it goes without saying that each of those people and the contributions they make to the business matter even more.
8. Host a Thanksgiving Event
This last option might not be relevant to every business, but if it’s something you can do, consider hosting a local (or online!) Thanksgiving event, perhaps as a fundraiser for a local charity (i.e., all donations and X percent of every sale goes towards an animal shelter or local organization), and host a Thanksgiving event around the themes of gratitude and partnership – perhaps highlighting your own business’ growth and impact on the community, or just giving a platform to local activists and event guests.
Online events are particularly interesting for businesses that already have a significant online following, and some experience hosting streams or web events online. A gym that has been offering online classes might be able to host a Thanksgiving workout-along while raising funds for a Thanksgiving-themed charity run, for example.
Smaller businesses or businesses with no physical location or large online following might not have the audience needed to host a Thanksgiving event on their own.
Need Help with Your Digital Marketing?
Creating a digital marketing strategy based on research and results requires time and attention most business owners simply don’t have. This can lead to frustration and missed opportunities to reach new customers.
Fortunately, Sachs Marketing Group is here to help. As a full-service digital marketing agency, we offer a wide range of digital marketing services, including everything from PPC advertising management and search engine optimization to social media marketing and even web design and development.
We handle everything from crafting and deploying your digital marketing strategy to measuring results and providing monthly reporting, so you can rest assured you’re in good hands with our team.
Contact us today! We’d love to discuss your business and share how we can help, so you can focus on running your business.
Conclusion
Thanksgiving is a time for family, friends, and food. But it’s also an important time in retail and business, as it’s building up to the anticipation of the holidays and introduces the holiday shopping spree. Global ecommerce is expected to represent over 21.5% of total retail sales in 2023, equating to approximately $6.15 trillion. Take advantage of growing traffic and an increased interest in local and online deals by amping up your marketing and ad campaigns, updating your catalogs on Google and various shopping platforms like Shopify, and alerting customers to oncoming deals and promotions.
With these Thanksgiving marketing ideas, your business can attract more customers during the holiday season and beyond! Whether you’re hosting an online Thanksgiving event or highlighting your great staff, there are plenty of ways to show customers how much you appreciate them.
So why not try these Thanksgiving marketing ideas and start reaping the benefits today?
Nice post!
Thanks, Mark!