The temperature may still be in the 90s, but owners of small, retail businesses should be deep in their plans for a successful Christmas shopping season.
The Augusta office of the UGA Small Business Development Center and SCORE, an organization of experts who volunteer to help small businesses, shared advice for holiday marketing plans. SCORE is a nationwide organization with an office in Aiken.
Leading the webinar was Patty Ross, founder of Golden State Marketing and California Wine Marketing.
She said the most important thing is to plan ahead. She recommended using a content calendar to plan out each step.
“Use your calendar for planning and archive purposes,” she said. “Once you have it planned out, the next year you can go back to it. It’s available for both planning and archive purposes, and you can sync your social media, your email campaigns, your text marketing, your blogs, everything on here. I know marketing can be overwhelming, so we want to get off of that train of overwhelm and panic.”
Ross used the Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) 2026 Holiday Shopping Report showing an anticipated dip in holiday spending.
“They’re projected to dip just about 2% from previous years. It says we have a historic low in consumer confidence,” she said. “But for most households, the presents under the tree or by the candles aren’t going to get cut. Millennials are pulling back the most; they are declining gift spending and travel.”
She added that AI will play a significant role in taking over the lead for coupon clipping.
“Twenty-nine percent of consumers plan to use AI somewhere in their holiday shopping,” she said. “We’re talking about ChatGPT and all the AI tools out there. Prompts to ask how do we find travel deals and shopping deals.”
Despite the use of online tools, Millennials, the digital generation, are leading a revival in analog gifts. Toys and clothing, items without screens, top the list of anticipated purchases.
Whether a business is B2B or business-to-consumer, Ross said waiting until September to begin holiday marketing plans may be too late in the year for a successful campaign.
Rebecca Mixon, director of the Augusta office of the University of Georgia’s (UGA) Small Business Development Center (SBDC), agreed.
“Holiday plans need to be pretty much moving by May or June, depending on particularly for retail, depending on merchandise inventory you’re going to get in,” she advised. “What are you going to do around those shipments that are coming in? How are you going to promote them? There’s a lot of levers that need to be pulled on that, and I think that marketing needs to be planned out earlier.”
SBDC program coordinator Shelby Carl told ABD that when she creates a marketing plan for a business, she begins a quarter ahead, putting holiday marketing plans in late spring.
Then, I like to set a start date, and normally, the start day is a little flexible, depending on what dates are important for each business owner or what industry they’re in,” she said. “Everyone needs to have their stuff done by June or July if they want to have their holiday marketing ready. If I were doing marketing holiday marketing, I would have a whole campaign that leads up to and into Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
Learn more about the SCORE office in Aiken, including finding a mentor at https://www.score.org/sc/greater-aiken/
