It doesn’t seem that long since Small Business Saturday was a brand new event, fresh from the States!
Now it’s an established annual event for small businesses to encourage customers to spend their money with the enterprises that keep Britain in work. What else does Small Business Saturday provide? Find out more here!

Transcript:

Hi, and welcome to another episode of BaranovTV, designed to demystify the world of accounts and tax and to help your business grow.

Today I wanted to talk to you about Small Business Saturday.

It’s in its fifth year this year and will run on Saturday, the 1st of December. We did an event the very first year it came to the UK from America, and we found that it was really beneficial in terms of creating some awareness and some interest, in an event that we otherwise wouldn’t have really got involved with. So I thought I’d just make you aware of it and just sort of talk around it for a little bit just to make you aware of some options:

• what Small Business Saturday is all about
• what you could do with it
• some of the other things that they’re actually incorporating around the one day

What they’re trying to do is develop it from just a one-day event to be of more use and being able to provide some more resources for small businesses and more support for them too. So, obviously on the day, there will be a lot of interest through social media etc, so it’ll be an opportunity to almost, it’s kind of like the Shop Local type event to try and encourage people and consumers to deal with and to support small businesses. Which, being one ourselves, we whole-heartedly condone and encourage!

So, that first year, we did an event where we were open on a Saturday, because we were quite often there anyway.

• We encouraged clients to drop in their records.
• We had some nibbles and some hot drinks.
• We had a giveaway that we did on the day, and we really just tried to create some momentum around the fact that we were open and that Small Business Saturday was in existence.

This year, we’re doing something slightly different. We’re not going to be open, but we are going to be doing quite a lot on social media and just encouraging people to speak. So, if you do decide to do an event for Small Business Saturday, please do let us know! We’d love to talk about it, we’d love to put something on the blog about it or to put it on our social media platforms just to help reach as wide an audience as possible.

There are events up and down the country. There’s a bus tour going on at the moment being operated by Small Business Saturday, the organisation, where they’re supplying mentoring and training and support to small businesses around the county.

So you can have a look at that and see what other people are doing and perhaps get some inspiration about an event or an offer or a giveaway or something that you might want to do to jump on that bandwagon really.

There are, they are linked with the new Duke of York Inspiring Digital Enterprise Award system, and there are people that are using that quite nicely to get some quite positive PR for themselves and their own business. So you might want to have a look at that.

There are also workshops that you can register for to register and advertise your business. So there is a directory on there that will give you a link back to your website which does help with Google searches etc.

You can download a marketing pack which gives you lots of ideas about things you might want to do. It also gives you logos that you can put on your website or however else you might want to use that. You might want to include it in a newsletter out to your customers, reminding them that you’re there and suggesting that they might want to get in touch because you’re doing X for small business Saturday.

It’s a good opportunity to get together with other local businesses, whether in your area or within your market, to try and say, well you know, “We’re all small businesses, what can we do together to come together to actually sort of try and take advantage of this event?” It might give you, if nothing else, a little bit more attraction on social media. It might give you a little bit more interest before Christmas if that’s your market.

I just thought we’d let you know that it’s going on. I know that a lot of people out there, a lot of clients have used it in the past and to good purpose.

So, Small Business Saturday, as I say 1st of December 2018 is the fifth running. So, that in itself is something, just so you know, the fifth running, let’s get some attention around it.

So, good luck with it. As I say, do let me know if you do decide to do something, and we’d love to help you promote that through our networks too!

Let me know what you get up to, and I’ll see you all very soon.