Holiday Marketing Plan for Las Vegas Small Businesses

A holiday marketing plan for a Las Vegas small business starts in October. Update your Google Business Profile hours and posts, clean up your email list, plan social content, refresh your local pages, set ad budgets before Thanksgiving week and ask every customer for a review. Then decide whether each push is aimed at visitors, locals or both.

Below is the calendar, what to do in each channel, how to think about ad timing and budget, and the Las Vegas details that a generic national checklist misses.

What Are the Key Holiday Dates for Las Vegas Businesses?

Put these on one calendar before you plan a single post or ad. The national shopping weekend is short, and December in Las Vegas has its own rhythm on top of it.

• Thanksgiving: Thursday, November 26.
• Black Friday: Friday, November 27.
• Small Business Saturday: Saturday, November 28. American Express founded Small Business Saturday in 2010, and it falls on the Saturday after Thanksgiving each year.
• Cyber Monday: Monday, November 30.
• Wrangler National Finals Rodeo (NFR): December 3 through 12 at the Thomas & Mack Center, with ten performances listed on the official NFR schedule.
• Hanukkah: the first candle is lit on the evening of Friday, December 4, and the eighth day is Saturday, December 12, per Hebcal.
• Christmas Eve and Christmas Day: Thursday, December 24 and Friday, December 25.
• New Year's Eve and New Year's Day: Thursday, December 31 and Friday, January 1.

Notice that the NFR run overlaps almost all of Hanukkah and the busiest stretch of December gift shopping. For a lot of local businesses, that ten-day window matters as much as Black Friday.

When Should a Las Vegas Business Start Holiday Marketing?

Start now, while you still have time to make decisions instead of reacting. The SBA's guide to making a marketing plan lists the pieces most plans cover: your target market, your competitive advantage, your sales plan, your goals, a marketing action plan, a budget, and a way to measure and update the plan. A holiday plan is the same thing on a short clock.

Here is the timeline we use with local owners:

• Late October: pick your offers and decide who each one is for. Write down your holiday hours. Set a total season budget for ads.
• First week of November: add holiday hours to your Google Business Profile, publish a holiday page on your website, clean your email list and draft the emails.
• Mid November: start social teasers, schedule Google posts, and launch ads at a modest level so they have time to gather data.
• Thanksgiving week through Cyber Monday: run the offers, send the emails, watch the ads daily and answer messages fast.
• December: shift to gift cards, last-minute services and NFR week if visitors are part of your business. Keep holiday hours accurate.
• First week of January: thank customers, ask for reviews, and write down what worked while you still remember.

How Should You Update Your Google Business Profile for the Holidays?

Your Google Business Profile is often the first thing a customer sees, and holiday hours are where it most often goes wrong. Wrong hours send people to a locked door, and that customer may not try again.

Google's help page on setting special hours walks through it: open your Business Profile, choose Edit profile, then Hours, then select Edit next to Special hours, pick the date, set your hours or mark it closed, and save. Google says special hours are for a business that temporarily changes its hours or stays closed for up to 6 days in a row.

One tip from that page is easy to skip: Google recommends you confirm your hours for official holidays even if they are the same as your regular hours, because it makes it clear to customers that your special hours are accurate. Do it for Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.

Google posts are the other half. According to Google's page on creating posts, you can publish three kinds:

• Updates for general news, with an optional button that links to booking, ordering or more information.
• Offers for sales and deals. An offer needs a title, dates and a time, and Google adds a "View Offer" button automatically. You can also add a coupon code, a link and terms.
• Events for something happening at your business, with start and end dates and times.

A few details worth knowing: you can schedule a post to publish later, Google reviews every post against its content policy before it goes live, and a post with a phone number in the description might be rejected if Google cannot connect that number to your business. Google also says posts older than 6 months are archived unless a date range is set, so give holiday offers clear start and end dates.

Are You Marketing to Visitors, Locals or Both?

This is the Las Vegas question most holiday checklists never ask. A visitor in town for NFR week and a Henderson family shopping for gifts want different things, find you in different ways and respond to different messages. We cover the split in depth in our guide to marketing to tourists and locals, but here is how it plays out in the holidays.

Locals are your Small Business Saturday audience. They respond to gift cards, neighborhood pride, loyalty and a reason to come back in January. They read your emails, follow you on social and remember how you treated them last year.

Visitors decide fast. They search on their phones, look at the map results, check your hours and your most recent reviews, and go. For them, accurate hours, fresh photos and a clear offer on your Business Profile do more than an email ever will.

NFR is the big December crossover. Rodeo fans fill the city for ten days, and restaurants, bars, salons, western wear shops and gift shops can plan for it the same way they plan for a major convention. Our post on timing marketing to the convention calendar lays out the ramp-up schedule, and it works for NFR week too: build awareness a few weeks out, shift to direct offers as the dates get close, and follow up afterward.

How Should You Use Email During the Holiday Season?

Email is the channel you own. Nobody else controls who sees it, and your past customers already know you. Keep it to opt-in subscribers only, and keep the plan simple:

• An early heads-up in the first half of November that tells subscribers what is coming and when.
• A Small Business Saturday email a few days before November 28 that gives locals a reason to visit in person.
• A short Black Friday through Cyber Monday sequence if you sell online or have a real offer, with a clear end date.
• A December gift card or last-minute email before Christmas, timed to your own cutoffs.
• A thank-you email in early January with a review request and a reason to come back.

Split your list if you can. Locals who visit often and out-of-town customers who bought once should not get the same message.

Every commercial email also has to follow federal rules. The FTC's CAN-SPAM compliance guide says your message must include a valid physical postal address and a clear, easy way to opt out, and you must honor an opt-out request within 10 business days. Most email platforms handle the unsubscribe link for you, but check that your address is in the footer.

What Should You Post on Social Media Over the Holidays?

Plan your social posts as a calendar, not a scramble. Two or three posts a week through November and December, built around your dates, beats a burst of ten posts on Black Friday and silence after.

Good holiday posts for a local business:

• Your holiday hours, posted early and pinned, matching your Google Business Profile exactly.
• Behind the scenes: your team, your prep, your shop getting decorated.
• The offer, plainly: what it is, who it is for, when it ends.
• Gift ideas built from what you already sell, including gift cards.
• A Small Business Saturday post that tells locals why shopping with you keeps money in the neighborhood.

American Express offers free help here. Its Shop Small resource hub for businesses lists free Shop Small signage you can order, free ready-to-use social posts and printable posters, and the Shop Small Map, subject to its eligibility rules. Use the materials if they fit your brand, and pair them with your own photos so your posts still look like you.

How Do Local SEO Updates Help Before the Holidays?

Local SEO is slower than ads, so do it first. The goal is that anyone who searches for you, on Google or in the map results, finds the same correct information everywhere.

• Match your hours everywhere. Your website, your Google Business Profile, your social profiles and any directory listings should all show the same holiday hours.
• Publish one holiday page on your website in early November with your hours, offers, gift cards and dates. Update that page each year instead of creating a new one, so it keeps whatever links and history it has built.
• Add fresh photos to your Business Profile: your space decorated, your team, your holiday products.
• Answer the obvious questions on your site in plain words: Are you open on Thanksgiving? Do you sell gift cards? Do you take walk-ins in December?

When Should You Run Paid Ads, and How Much Should You Spend?

There is no single right budget, because it depends on your margins, your offer and how much demand already exists for what you sell. What we can tell you is how to plan it so the money goes where it matters.

Set a total season budget first, then split it by week. Weight it toward the days that actually matter for your business. A retailer may lean on Black Friday through Cyber Monday. A restaurant or entertainment venue near the Strip may care more about NFR week. A service business may care most about early December, before schedules fill.

Start a few weeks early at a lower level. Campaigns that start the week of Thanksgiving have no history to learn from, and many competitors launch that same week.

Know how daily budgets behave. Google's page on average daily budgets says a campaign might spend up to twice its average daily budget on a given day to catch traffic swings, but over a month it will not spend more than 30.4 times the average daily budget. A one-day spike in spend is not a mistake, so judge spend by the week.

Use seasonality adjustments carefully. Google describes seasonality adjustments as an advanced tool for telling Smart Bidding about expected conversion rate changes during short events like sales. Google says to use them only if you expect major changes, because Smart Bidding already manages seasonal events, and that they work best for events of 1 to 7 days, not stretches longer than 14 days. A three-day Black Friday sale is the kind of event they are built for.

Target by place and set end dates. Aim local offers at the neighborhoods you serve, aim visitor offers around the Strip, Downtown and the areas your customers actually come from, and give every holiday campaign an end date so nothing keeps spending in January.

Pause when you sell out. Nothing wastes money faster than ads for an offer you can no longer fill.

Remember that ad budget is separate from what you pay anyone to manage the ads. Plan for both.

How Do You Get More Reviews During the Holidays?

The holidays bring more customers through the door, which means more chances for reviews. Visitors who do not know the area often lean on recent reviews when they decide where to go.

Google's tips for getting reviews are simple: ask customers to leave a review by sharing a Google link or a QR code, reply to reviews so customers see their feedback matters, and value all reviews, because honest and balanced feedback helps future customers decide.

• Ask every customer, not just the ones you think are happy.
• Put a QR code at the register and on receipts or invoices through the season.
• Never offer a discount or gift for a review. Google's policies prohibit it.
• Reply to the busy-season reviews too, including the frustrated ones about lines or wait times. Our guide on responding to negative Google reviews covers how to do that without making it worse.

What Should You Do After the Holidays End?

The SBA's guidance is to compare your marketing costs to the revenue they generated, so you know what earned a positive return and what needs to change. Do that in the first week of January, while it is fresh.

• Write down what sold, which emails got replies, which posts got shares and which ads produced calls or sales.
• Send the thank-you email and the review request.
• Remove expired offers from your Business Profile, website and ads.
• Set your regular hours back if anything changed.
• Start next year's calendar with this year's notes on it.

How Can a Local Team Help With Your Holiday Plan?

If running all of this on top of the busiest weeks of your year sounds like too much, that is what we do. We are a local Las Vegas team, and our flat monthly plans cover the pieces above:

• Foundation, $750 a month: website care, local SEO, your Google Business Profile and a monthly report.
• Growth, $1,500 a month: everything in Foundation, plus social posting, content and 1 ad channel.
• Operator, $3,000 a month: everything in Growth, plus full ads, day-to-day systems and priority turnaround.

No setup fee, billing starts month one. Month to month, with 30 days' notice to cancel. Ad budget is always paid separately, directly to Google or Meta. Our flat fee covers managing your ads, never the spend itself, and we never take a percentage of ad spend. Schedule a Call and we will walk through your holiday calendar with you.

The Bottom Line

Written by

Cash Colligan

Founder of The Voice of Cash, a local senior marketing team in Las Vegas. Raised in Vegas, with 15+ years in marketing.

LinkedInMore articles