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For Founders Ready to Build Smarter
Marketing Playbook for Small Businesses: Holiday Shopping Edition
Holiday marketing is bigger than Black Friday.
The Marketing Playbook for Small Businesses: Holiday Shopping Edition is a strategic holiday marketing guide designed to help small business owners understand how to market and sell throughout the full holiday shopping season, from October through December 24.
Created by CurateHER Collective, this playbook goes beyond generic holiday marketing tips, Black Friday ideas, social media prompts, and discount strategies. It teaches the marketing principles behind the decisions so you can build a holiday strategy that actually fits your business, customers, budget, margins, and capacity.
Inside, you'll learn essential marketing concepts including the customer journey, awareness, consideration, conversion, customer acquisition, retention, value proposition, purchase friction, channel strategy, promotions, gross margin, market research, and marketing hypotheses, with practical exercises to help you apply each concept to your own business.
You'll learn how to:
Build a holiday marketing strategy around your customer's buying journey
Understand what your customers need in October, November, and December
Create marketing objectives instead of simply posting more content
Develop holiday offers without automatically relying on deep discounts
Evaluate promotions based on your actual margins and business model
Choose marketing channels based on what your business needs, not what everyone else is doing
Create a holiday marketing calendar from October through December 24
Turn customer questions and objections into better marketing
Use in-person events and CurateHER Sip & Shops as opportunities for market research and real-world marketing practice
Test marketing ideas, observe customer behavior, and use what you learn to make better decisions
Measure more than sales, including leads, conversion, customer acquisition, retention, and profitability
This playbook is intentionally designed for small businesses, not scaled-down versions of major retailers. You will not be encouraged to copy the marketing strategies of Amazon, Target, Sephora, or other large companies with entirely different budgets, teams, margins, inventory, and resources.
Instead, you'll learn how to ask the more important question:
What does my business actually need?
Because effective marketing isn't about doing more. It's about understanding why, how, and when to make the right marketing decisions for your business.
Your Strategy. Your Customer. Your Business.
Use this playbook to build your holiday marketing strategy, put your knowledge into practice at CurateHER Sip & Shops, evaluate what happens in the real world, and refine your approach as you grow.
Recommended for: small business owners, product-based businesses, service providers, makers, founders, entrepreneurs, and women-owned businesses preparing for the holiday shopping season.
Copyright Notice: CurateHER Collective, AccelerateHER, and all associated content, materials, frameworks, exercises, language, and educational resources are the intellectual property of CurateHER Collective and are subject to copyright. All rights reserved. This content is intended for individual educational use only and may not be reproduced, redistributed, resold, republished, copied, or used to create derivative works without written permission from CurateHER Collective.
AccelerateHER is a curated collection of education, resources, and personalized support for women building businesses. Explore digital guides with interactive workbooks, discover grants and essential small-business resources, learn how to approach applications and business requirements, or work one-on-one with Madison starting at $99/hour. It is practical support for the moments when you need to know what to do next, and how to do it well.
How to Grow Your Email List
Black Friday / Q4 Small Business Edition
Your Instagram following is not your customer list.
And during Q4, that distinction matters.
How to Grow Your Email List: Black Friday / Q4 Small Business Edition is a strategic email marketing guide for small business owners who want to build an audience they can actually reach, nurture, and market to throughout the holiday shopping season and beyond.
Instead of telling you to simply "add an email signup to your website," this guide teaches you why email marketing matters, how to attract the right subscribers, and when to use your email list throughout the Q4 customer journey.
Because the goal isn't to collect hundreds of random email addresses.
The goal is to build an audience of people who have given you permission to stay connected with them.
Inside, you'll learn how to:
Understand why an email list is one of the most valuable owned marketing channels for a small business
Define what makes someone a valuable subscriber
Create a compelling reason for customers to join your list without relying exclusively on discounts
Build email list growth opportunities across your website, social media, events, and in-person customer interactions
Use Q4 shopping behavior to attract subscribers before they are ready to purchase
Understand the difference between audience growth, lead generation, and conversion
Create a simple lead magnet or subscriber incentive that makes sense for your business
Capture email addresses at pop-ups, holiday markets, and CurateHER Sip & Shops
Understand what should happen after someone subscribes
Create a basic welcome sequence that begins building the customer relationship
Use October, November, and December differently as your customer's holiday buying journey evolves
Turn holiday subscribers into customers in Q4 and relationships you can continue nurturing in Q1
Marketing Definition: Owned Audience
An owned audience is a group of people your business has permission to communicate with directly through a channel you control, such as email.
Social media followers are valuable, but your relationship with them exists within a platform you do not control.
Your email list gives you a direct communication channel with people who have actively chosen to hear from your business.
That makes email more than a place to send promotions.
It can become a tool for relationship building, education, customer retention, product launches, event promotion, sales, and repeat purchases.
This Is Not a "Get 10,000 Subscribers" Guide
For a small business, bigger is not always better.
You may not need 10,000 subscribers.
You may need your first 100 people who genuinely care about what you sell.
Then 250.
Then 500.
Then 1,000.
The quality of your audience matters because a list full of people who never intended to purchase is not necessarily a successful marketing asset.
This guide will help you think strategically about who you are trying to attract, what you are giving them a reason to stay for, and how your email list fits into your broader marketing strategy.
Put It Into Practice
Your next CurateHER Sip & Shop can become more than a sales opportunity.
It can become an opportunity to:
Meet potential customers.
Build your email list.
Learn what people are actually looking for.
Create relationships.
Test your messaging.
And bring those relationships home with you after the event.
Because the sale that happens at your table is not necessarily the end of the customer journey.
It could be the beginning.
Copyright Notice: CurateHER Collective, AccelerateHER, and all associated content, materials, frameworks, exercises, language, and educational resources are the intellectual property of CurateHER Collective and are subject to copyright. All rights reserved. This content is intended for individual educational use only and may not be reproduced, redistributed, resold, republished, copied, or used to create derivative works without written permission from CurateHER Collective.
How to Use Pinterest as a Small Business Owner
Black Friday / Q4 Small Business Edition
What if one of the most valuable marketing platforms for your small business isn't the one you're spending the most time on?
Pinterest is not Instagram. It is not simply another social media platform where you need to post every day, chase engagement, or build a massive following.
Pinterest is a visual search and discovery platform where people actively look for ideas, products, inspiration, solutions, and things they intend to save, plan, and potentially purchase.
How to Use Pinterest as a Small Business Owner: Black Friday / Q4 Small Business Edition is a strategic Pinterest marketing guide designed to help small business owners understand how to use Pinterest for discovery, website traffic, product visibility, and holiday marketing without turning it into another full-time content job.
This guide teaches you the why, how, and when behind Pinterest marketing so you can determine whether and how Pinterest fits into your own marketing strategy.
Inside, you'll learn how to:
Understand how Pinterest differs from Instagram and other social media platforms
Learn why search intent matters when creating Pinterest content
Identify what your ideal customer may actually be searching for
Understand the role of keywords in Pinterest discovery
Create Pinterest boards that support your business goals
Develop Pins around products, education, inspiration, gift ideas, and customer problems
Repurpose content you already have instead of creating an entirely separate content strategy
Use Pinterest to support your Q4 and holiday shopping strategy
Create content designed to remain discoverable beyond the day it is published
Connect Pinterest content to your website, products, blog posts, guides, or other relevant destinations
Understand basic Pinterest analytics and what the data can tell you
Determine whether Pinterest should be a priority for your business right now
Avoid wasting time trying to use Pinterest like Instagram
Marketing Definition: Search Intent
Search intent is the reason behind a person's search.
Someone searching "holiday outfit ideas" is looking for inspiration.
Someone searching "best gifts for new moms" is looking for recommendations.
Someone searching "gold hoop earrings under $100" is much closer to a purchasing decision.
Understanding the difference helps you create content that meets people where they are in the customer journey.
That is the real opportunity with Pinterest.
You are not simply asking:
"What should I post?"
You are asking:
"What is my customer already looking for, and how can my business provide a useful answer?"
You Don't Need Another Platform. You Need a Strategy.
The purpose of this guide is not to convince every small business owner that Pinterest is the answer.
It is to teach you how to determine whether Pinterest makes sense for your business.
Maybe Pinterest should become an important discovery channel for you.
Maybe your business needs to focus on email first.
Maybe your website needs attention before you send more traffic to it.
Maybe you have enough content already and simply need to repurpose it strategically.
There is no universal marketing checklist for small businesses.
The right strategy depends on your customer, your goals, your resources, and where your business is right now.
Put It Into Practice
Your marketing strategy should not live inside a workbook.
Use what you learn to make better decisions about your content, your website, your products, and your customer experience.
Because the goal isn't to become better at posting.
The goal is to become better at marketing.
Copyright Notice: CurateHER Collective, AccelerateHER, and all associated content, materials, frameworks, exercises, language, and educational resources are the intellectual property of CurateHER Collective and are subject to copyright. All rights reserved. This content is intended for individual educational use only and may not be reproduced, redistributed, resold, republished, copied, or used to create derivative works without written permission from CurateHER Collective.
“As a small woman owned business supporting others, I want to spread awareness of all the valuable and critical information I wish i knew sooner”
Madison Forté | Founder & Owner of CurateHERneed a founder coffee chat?
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