If you’re a service based business owner you may be wondering how you can participate in the Black Friday sales season by running your own promotion or special offer, or if you should even bother trying to “compete” during BF/CM.
We think it’s worth a shot to try a Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, or Cyber Monday sale and see how your audience responds!
Why? So many buyers are primed to spend during this time, they’re already on the lookout for promotions from their favorite brands and businesses, so it’s a great time to give your audience an incentive to buy from you.
Here are some of our best ideas for Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, or Cyber Monday Sales for Service Based Businesses:
1/ Offer a Discount for a Limited Number of Clients
As a service provider offering a discount can be a little bit tricky, especially if you don’t limit the discount in some way. After all, you’re still putting in the same amount of time to provide the service, but you’ll be earning less so it may not be feasible to let everyone sign up for the offer.
So why discount in the first place? This can be a good option if you want to book out some work to fill the last few spots in your calendar, pre-book projects for next year, or just to inject a little extra holiday cash into your business.
If you decide to discount, we recommend limiting the duration of the sale to only a day or two, and limiting the number of clients or bookings available. This not only ensures that you can actually complete the services (you probably don’t want too many people signing up at once!), but it also creates a real sense of urgency for prospective buyers.
If they were considering working with you, this special offer with limited space means they have to make a decision, fast.
For example: if you’re a website designer, you could offer a 20% discount on your custom website design package for the first 5 people who sign up. Or, if you’re a VA, you could offer a discount on the first three months of services for the first 3 clients who book for 2021.
2/ Add in an additional service for free
If you’re not keen on offering a discount, don’t despair! There are many other ways to partake in BF/CM!
Another option is to offer an additional service as a bonus. So if people sign up for your coaching services, design packages, or brand consulting, they get something else for free.
In this scenario, the client pays full price, but gets something extra thrown in as an added bonus.
Just make sure that the bonus is something relevant to the service you want them to buy, and something that they would actually want/perceive as valuable.
It can be a service that you already offer as an extra add-on, but thrown in for free if they buy during your BF/CM promotion.
For example: Let’s say you’re not going to offer a discount on your custom web design services, but instead, if someone books with you during the sale, they’ll receive a FREE landing page or sales page design in addition to the standard web pages in your package.
3/ Create a bonus product anyone who signs up can get
If you don’t want to offer a discount or an additional service, you could create a bonus product that clients receive when they sign up during the sale.
This could be anything like templates, an e-book, a short video course, a deep dive training, etc.
Not sure what to create? Think of add-on services you provide and consider how you could make one of those into a done-for-you product that would only require your effort up-front, and then could be delivered easily to anyone who takes advantage of your offer.
For example: as a web designer, you decide to create a bonus bundle of editable social media and workbook templates for anyone signing up for your services during the sale!
4/ Partner up with other service providers to create a bundle
If you like the idea of creating a product related to your services, you could take it a step further and partner up with other small business owners & service providers to each contribute a product that you include as part of a bundle.
You would each promote the bundle to your own list and buyers would receive access to all the products in the bundle.
Of course, this option means some coordination and logistics to figure out who’s contributing what and how the products will be delivered to buyers, but if you have the time and network to plan a bundle like this, it can be a great way to not only make more sales during Black Friday, but also introduce your services to new audiences who may go on to buy from you later on!
5/ Amp up your affiliate marketing
If all of the other options are sounding like too much work, or you feel like you’re running out of time to pull your own promotion together, you can always be an affiliate for someone else’s sale and earn extra income that way!
Affiliate marketing during BF/CM is a great way to inject cash into your business without having to do a lot of extra work!
We always suggest only becoming an affiliate of brands you’ve used and truly enjoy working with or using for yourself.
For Black Friday you could do a roundup of your favorite tools for entrepreneurs and link back to your trusted products/services using affiliate links.
Or you could do a roundup of Black Friday sales specifically related to your niche — for example, if you’re a wellness coach, you could create a blog post with links to your favorite nutritional products, exercise equipment, workout gear, or other related products/services that are on sale.
If you have an engaged audience, using affiliate marketing is a great way to get more sales, while also helping your audience cut through the clutter of the season and find solutions for their problems from someone they trust.
Make a list of the all the products you love to use that you think your audience would be interested in, and then contact those brands to see if they have an affiliate program and are doing a Black Friday sale you can promote.
P.S. If you love Haute Stock, we have an affiliate program (open to members) where you can earn 30% commission off of new membership signups during our biggest sale of the year this Black Friday!
Want more Black Friday sales ideas?
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