With the scramble on to get ready for the biggest shopping season of the year, local retailers are understandably looking for ways to stand out. If you want to make sure your local business cashes in big this holiday, it’s time to get your holiday sales and marketing strategy going fast.  Try a few these marketing ideas:

As a local retailer, you’re competing not just with other businesses in your geographic area but also online retailers. So how can you compel customers to visit your location to spend their holiday budgets? Partnering with other businesses.

Often, shopping communities band together to entice shoppers leading up the holidays. Don’t forget to create a Shop Small offer to promote for Small Business Saturday. It’s the Saturday following Thanksgiving and Black Friday, small businesses all over the US offer discounts, bundle deals and giveaways to shoppers to get them to support local businesses. Because there’s already a significant amount of marketing around this event, participating in it is a no-brainer.

Look for other community events to join in as well, such as setting up a booth at a local hospital, donating a portion of profits to a local charity, providing branded giveaways and goodies for the local Santa to hand out, and food drives.

Even if you’re a local business, you will still need an online presence in order to attract customers during the holidays. Brendan Morrissey, CEO of digital marketing startup Netsertive, had this advice: “Retailers need to be prepared for the rise in ‘near me’ searches this holiday season – customers searching for products and businesses by location. For small businesses, this means optimizing your mobile SEO to be found online.”

Morrissey says the first step is to make sure your Google My Business listing is up-to-date and accurate, so that your business will appear in geography-based searches. Additionally, use location keywords on your website so that people searching for, as an example, “toy store Normal Heights” can find you.

All the channels you normally use to market your retail business — email, social media, content marketing — will need to be turned way up during November. Keep the message consistent: come to our location to save big for the holidays.

Your emails should promote the hot products you’ve marked down, as well as contain high-value coupons. Social media should provide teasers for what will go on sale next. Build content on your blog such as best gifts for busy business owners to help people decide what to buy. But don’t wait until two weeks before the holiday to plan your marketing; instead, map out weekly promotions and coupons in advance so all you have to do is fill in the blanks.

Door-to-door marketing is a canvassing technique that is generally used for sales, marketing, advertising, or campaigning, in which the person or persons walk from the door of one house to the door of another, trying to sell or advertise a product or service to the general public or gather information. People who use this sales approach are often called traveling salesmen, or the archaic name drummer, to “drum up” business. This technique is also sometimes called direct sales. A variant of this involves cold calling first, when another sales representative attempts to gain agreement that a salesperson should visit.

With the realization of telephone “Do Not Call” lists it is becoming increasingly more difficult to connect with consumers and business people. An emerging trend is the deployment of very professional, highly skilled door-to-door canvassers to drive product sales and brand awareness.

Coordinating, training and motivating these teams to produce results are at the very core of Fulcrum’s proven capabilities. Fulcrum has the knowledge and experience required to implement these programs, such as best days and times to canvass, who will sell the most product; male, female, young or mature and what geographics and demographics respond best to door-to-door marketing. Put Fulcrum’s experience to work for you and avoid the costly mistakes of trying to manage these programs in-house.

Hire and Train Door-to-Door Marketing Team

If you’re in charge of hiring people, that typically means that you’ve found success in Door To Door Marketing yourself. You know what it takes to be great, but now you’re stuck with an entirely new problem. How do you find others who will be just as good (if not better) and will stick around and grow into important influencers invested in the long term growth of the company? A great D2D sales company is a great recruiting company. So what does that greatness look like?

First off, you need to realize that you’re not going to hire a superstar every time. If you think you have found one, be careful. It’s not hard for someone to seem golden during one interview and you don’t want to be fooled.

Even if you think the candidate does have a lot of great experience working in the field for other companies, you have to realize that success doesn’t always translate. What worked for them at previous companies probably won’t work as well for you. In fact, their success will probably make them stubborn; after all, what reason do they have to follow your approach when they’ve figured out their own?

It’s also possible that the rep’s previous company might have had much better-developed training and selling systems than you do, and that system was the key reason they killed it. If you’re not developing a competitive system, what does that communicate about your company? The more dialed-in you are about a rep’s success, the more likely you are to attract and keep strong performers.