How Shelf Companies Lost Their Appeal and What to Do Now
Also known as a ready-made company or an off-the-shelf company, a shelf company is a pre-registered business you can buy and customise.
For small business owners that sell flexible and adaptable products or services, you can successfully boost your sales by leveraging special anniversaries, events, and seasons throughout the year.
A lot of business owners market their products and services in a way that shows them ‘as they are’ rather than what they could be. To help boost your sales all year round you should look at the ways you can market your wares in synch with major holidays, seasons and the many smaller events that happen each year to encourage more sales.
Marketing your goods and services for major holidays is a no-brainer and everyone is used to doing Christmas promotions, New Year or Easter marketing campaigns, but are you really capitalising on the other opportunities presented on the calendar?
Unusual marketing opportunities
While seasonal marketing is second nature to most business owners, especially if you sell seasonal products, it is worth scrutinising the calendar for more unusual events and national days, weeks or months that you can capitalise on.
For example, July 2019 is the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. If you can connect your product or services in any way to the moon, space exploration, air travel or anything associated with the technology that helped to get us into space, then you have a sales hook to pique curiosity and draw potential customers in.
So if you were planning to offer some discounts to help commemorate the moon landing then you could use the following voucher codes:
- APOLLO
- LUNAR
- MOON
- ROCKET
- SPACE
You can look up many smaller National Awareness Days for the UK to see what up and coming events you can tie-in with what your business produces or sells. There is everything here from British Yorkshire Pudding Day to National Pet Month and Organic September, which you could apply to anything from food and drink to organic ingredients in your health and beauty products or treatments.
Don’t forget the hashtags!
For your social media marketing campaigns don’t forget to include relevant hashtags to go with your posts. These can draw in a whole new audience to your business who search Facebook and Twitter using hashtags for a particular subject.
Creating and promoting marketing campaigns around specific occasions and special events is a very effective strategy that can really work to raise awareness of your business and help to boost your sales, especially when you add relevant hashtags.
So for example if you are linking in with the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, you could use the following example hashtags:
- #Apollo11
- #Astronaut
- #LunarLanding
- #Moon
- #MoonLanding
- #MoonLanding50
- #MoonWalk
- #MoonWalk50
- #OneSmallStep
- #OuterSpace
- #RocketShip
- #Space
Even after your chosen special event or season has ended, people will still use hashtags to search for information on social media so they get more targeted results. So for example, if you were promoting something for Organic September and used the hashtag #OrganicHairOil, people will still search with this hashtag long after your campaign has finished.
Evergreen promotional materials
Many business owners will use promotional gifts and materials to help promote and raise awareness of their company. Whether this is in the form of free pens, keyrings, mugs and t-shirts etc. you can brand these promotional items with your company logo and message.
However, you can make your promotional materials more memorable and on-point if instead of just printing your company logo or brand on these items, you actually choose three or four relevant evergreen national events or awareness days, weeks or months and tie your branding in with these.
Christmas is an obvious tie-in so you can give out Christmas-related gifts with your company branding on, but remember that just about everyone else (including your direct competition) will also be doing this.
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Look for smaller niche awareness events
Sometimes picking the obvious seasons and events will see your message being drowned out by others or simply lost in a sea of promotional materials that people get bombarded with at this time of year.
For example, let’s say that you are a local cake baker and decorator. Instead of overly focussing on Christmas with your marketing campaign when you may already be pretty busy with bookings, why not look to boost sales of your cakes during a quieter month of the year, such as September.
Did you know that National Cupcake Week is held during September? This could be a good month to plan a marketing campaign and hit all your local businesses with flyers for a special offer or a discount for this week.
Push your National Cupcake Week celebration on social media (include relevant hashtags) and offer discounts for direct bookings etc.
If none of your direct competitors is doing this, then your cake company will stand out from the crowd and will come to mind when local people are looking for cakes for parties, weddings, corporate events, training days and other celebrations.
B2B marketing
Should your business involve working with or selling to other businesses, then you can still apply the same marketing tactics in relation to using awareness days or special events to promote your brand and strengthen your business links.
Again, look for niche days or weeks that apply to your business and leverage those events to run a special promotion offering discounts or extra free products or services.
You can read more about B2B marketing strategies to learn how to specifically target new B2B partners or to help increase uptake from an established partner.
Presenting a professional business image
No matter whether you intend to market your products or services to other businesses or you are looking to sell direct to customers, you will be presenting a much more trustworthy and professional image of your business should you actually form a Limited Company.
There are no guarantees with standard business set-ups, so if you are operating as a sole trader you must realise that you are putting your whole reputation on the line as well as risking your personal finances, your car and your home should anything go seriously wrong with your business.
There are many protective benefits by forming your own company especially with the limited liability status that you gain to help protect your personal assets.
It is much quicker and easier to set up your own company than you think! If you haven’t taken the necessary steps to go professional as yet, take a look at our range of company formations packages so you can see how easy and cost-effective the whole process is.
Don’t forget that you will have our team of very experienced formations experts on hand to perform your company formation on your behalf. We can make things so much smoother and easier for you and can usually get your new company up and running within one working day!
Do not hesitate to contact our friendly team if you need more help or some free advice about forming your own company. We are here to help!
