While your retail tenants are planning out their promotions, it’s crucial for shopping malls to come up with unique marketing ideas to increase foot traffic.
The holiday season sales in the U.S. between Thanksgiving and Christmas generated over $850 billion in 2018. This marked an increase of 5% compared to the previous year and is only expected to increase in 2019. It’s therefore crucial for malls to have a marketing plan ready to attract customers to their centers. After all, the higher your foot traffic, the better your mall will flourish.
To market your mall better, you need to come up with some unique ideas that will make it stand apart from the rest. Here are some marketing ideas that can help you bring the spotlight to your shopping mall during the holiday season.
1. Giveaways
Giveaways are a great way to attract the masses to your shopping mall during the holiday season. For these giveaways, you can come up with a special prize, such as a luxury car or free vacations. Remember, the more attractive the prize, the better will be the response from the people.
You can encourage your visitors to shop from the outlets in your shopping mall and give them an entry into the drawing for a chance to win the grand prize. You can also ask your tenants to promote this with their audiences to bring in even bigger crowds.
In addition, you can have small giveaways daily, where there can be multiple winners as well. This can make the offer sweeter for your shoppers.
2. Spread Word About Your Tenants Holiday Sales
Most of the stores in your mall will likely have holiday season sales during this period. One way of marketing your mall is by spreading the word about offers at the outlets in your mall. You can send out marketing messages to your audience regarding these sales, and this will help in attracting a crowd to your mall.
A great way of generating buzz around your shopping mall is by sending out alerts of flash deals to all those shoppers who are inside the mall. You should make an effort to promote such campaigns to your audience when they are in your retail shopping center.
If you generate word beforehand, people will come to the mall and wait for flash deals on their favorite products and rush to the relevant stores to get them at a discounted rate. This sort of promotion also helps you leverage the fear of missing out (FOMO) in shoppers. There may be many shoppers out there who may fear losing out on a good deal on their beloved products. These people will definitely make it to your mall to catch the deal.
You can send out such flash deal notifications through proximity marketing which sends messages to people when they’re connected to your guest Wi-Fi network.
4. Conduct Events
During the holiday season, everyone’s looking for different events that they can attend and enjoy holidays. This makes events an excellent draw for shopping malls. You should consider planning multiple events, activities, workshops, and more in your mall during these weeks to pull the crowd.
You could also host exhibitions and hire someone to play Santa and his elves to attract families to your mall. Alternatively, you could host contests where people can participate and have a chance to win prizes.
5. Decorate The Mall
During the holiday season, you need to decorate your mall. This will make the mall more festive and inviting causing people to visit the place just to see the decor. You could place large art installations and create Instagram ready display pieces that can attract folks who wish to take selfies in front of them.
Your goal should be to ensure that your shopping mall looks lively and in a festive mood when people visit it. However, make sure you avoid dull-looking decor can be very off-putting for holiday shoppers.
6. Leverage Social Media
You must leverage social media to promote all the events and sales at your shopping mall. Remember, beautiful photos and videos will always get traction, and you need to pump out more of these to attract crowds.
A great idea is to go live when you’ve some ongoing event in the mall or make announcements of your flash sales through it too. This will not only increase your footfall but also improve your engagement rates on social media.
7. Launch and Promote Gift Cards
If you don’t have gift cards for your shopping mall, it’s high time that you launch one. According to the National Retail Federation, gift cards were the most widely requested gifts during the holiday season for the last decade.
In addition, people plan to purchase an average of seven gift cards for their immediate family members. They also intend to buy two for their friends and one for their colleagues. It’s thus crucial that you have shopping mall’s gift cards that people can readily purchase. To make the offer sweeter, you can give them some extra cards to motivate people to come to your mall to purchase gift cards.
Subsequently, the recipients of the gift cards will also visit your mall to utilize them. This makes it a win-win situation for everyone!
Final Thoughts
With just over a month to go for the holiday season to begin, it’s high time that you start planning your marketing campaigns. Launch new giveaways for the holiday season. Promote your gift cards or introduce them if you haven’t already. You should also partner with your tenants to understand their offers and promote them to your audience.
Decorate your shopping mall for the holiday season and bring it to life. Finally, host events or performances to make your shopping mall the center of all things fun!
Do you have any creative marketing ideas for shopping malls for the holiday season? Share them with me in the comments.
