Don’t make these 3 mistakes before taking holidays

The holiday season can actually be a time for SMEs to get ahead. Here’s how.

Every year it feels as if the Christmas countdown starts earlier than the previous year, right?

For instance, if you go online in October, you are sure to find savvy business owners already spruiking their seasonal deals. Which is why planning ahead for the holiday season is so important for SMEs.

With a bit of forward planning you can make the most of potential customers, who might not only be looking to buy for themselves, but for others – no matter what you’re offering.

So, to make sure you can actually relax at the beach this year, be sure to avoid making these holiday season business blunders.

MISTAKE 1: Leave the scheduling of your employees shifts for the holiday period until the last minute.

SOLUTION: The last thing you want to be doing before going on leave is manually scheduling your hourly employees. Which is exactly what more than half of service organisations do, according to a recent Workjam study. To help ease your load this month, try using a cloud-based employee scheduling app to do it for you. Take a look at: Workjam a cloud-based, mobile and web-accessible employee relationship management platform. It’s best used for sourcing, qualifying, hiring, onboarding, scheduling and evaluating hourly workers. When I Work is designed to get you away from your desks. This app lets you manage everything on-the-go from allowing employees to set their own availability, get automatic reminders about when they work next, and even swap shifts with coworkers and request time off. ShiftPlanning is the winner of both employee scheduling and workforce management in GetRank and GetApp’s quarterly independent ranking of business apps. It’s great for employee scheduling, time clocking and even payroll.

MISTAKE 2: Fail to plan (and launch) a great holiday deal

SOLUTION: Start planning your holiday deals early. Know your customer base and what deals will intrigue them most this summer. Take a look at any data you have from last season’s purchases to understand how your customers operate at this time of year. Marketing discounts for goods and services around the holidays is always a great way to get the attention of new or potential customers.

MISTAKE 3: Forget to schedule your social media posts

SOLUTION: You might be kicking back on the beach, but your customers are always online. Use social media scheduling apps such as Hootsuite or SproutSocial so that all of your holiday season social media posts, blogs, deals and incentives are promoted without you needing to rub the sand from your hands. Don’t forget to use great images, native advertising campaigns, and segment your posts to suit specific consumers (if you have more than one target market).

Happy holidays!

DiffuzeHR is transforming the way SMEs approach HR by giving them access to an easy-to-use, cloud-based system (and the smarts) to systemize and simplify, ramp professionalism, and gain proactive control. DiffuzeHR helps SMEs by allowing them to minimise risks, reduce legal fees, decrease time spent on admin, attract and retain staff, and leverage best-practice, industry-specific HR and legal expertise in a way that is simple, easy, and efficient.

To learn more about the benefits of automating HR with DiffuzeHR, please book a demo at http://diffuze.com.au/.

Barry Lehrer

Having run my own small business for over twenty years, I understand one of the biggest challenges is protecting your business from potentially damaging personnel or HR issues. That’s why I developed Diffuze.