Grocery Store Marketing: Increasing Sales With Strong Holiday Promotions

We love creating marketing plans and promotions for our clients, but we especially love the opportunity each holiday brings for marketing. We're using Gaiss' Market as an example in this post, as we usually do with our grocery store examples. Increasing sales for grocery stores with strong holiday promotions is easy when you Work With Ambition.

Gaiss' Market is a 97 year old store in South Jersey with fresh cut deli, butcher meats, made to order kitchen, and market. The store has been our client for 3 years. This was the first Independence Day that we went all out with marketing and branding. The store was finally ready for this extra big push.

We had already branded the store as The Barbecue Headquarters of Cape May County for the summer, and this included a logo change, color change, and big branding push in marketing, so we were worried to redesign everything weeks later. We had faith and it was a BIG success.

With this method, we increased online sales 39% online June 26-July 7 2025 vs the same duration (Thursday-Sunday) 2024.

In store sales increased as well, and the store sold out of items like their award winning kielbasa, store formed burgers, and house made salads.

First, we brainstormed on the offer. Since the customers have been loving the package deals, we went that route. We created the Let's Get Grilling, Burger Night, and Hot Diggity Dog packages. The American Grill package already existed, but we asked the store to reduce the amount to 2 lbs per item to make a more affordable price. The other packages existed already, and the owner was able to take a few dollars off. We knew that so many people would be gathering at their second homes, so we decided to push hoagies trays too. We marketed the trays not only for July 4th, but as an easy way to feed the family while everyone is so buys getting their house and party ready.

The main concept was a structured deal that offered something for everyone. We wanted to be able to say "packages as low as $19.99". This really allowed us to reach a wide audience with a short sentence, as everyone was on a budget this year.

Once we got that together, we started the branding. We took a big step and made a custom 4th of July logo. As mentioned above, we just had created a special BBQ logo to use for the summer. So would the customers understand when we did it again? They did. We needed to keep "Barbecue Headquarters of Cape May County", so we added that in to tie it all together. All marketing for the promotion had this logo, along with a light blue background and fireworks. You can see how the branding is everywhere! We changed the Facebook and Local Express cover photos, we added a section to the website, we rebranded the email marketing, and we even made custom item listing photos to match. Click to see these images larger.

We needed social media to match this theme and we needed to make this very strong. Now with all of our full service clients, we create content. There are many photos used on Gaiss' social media that were taken at our home, because we are constantly enjoying Gaiss' products. But to have that full patriotic imagery in full force, we needed to use stock photos. We headed over to one of our favorite sites that specializes in real imagery photos free for use and found the perfect gallery. We could have hosted a shoot, but to save our client time and money we went with the stock gallery. There were even a handful of videos from the same shoot that allowed us to create a reel. We later did do a quick shoot of packages and that just sealed the deal on sales for the store!

Here are some of the posts from social media during this time frame that led to success

Stock Imagery Reel on Instagram

Package Photo Carousel Instagram

Potato Salad Reel on Instagram

Stock Imagery Carousel Instagram

Branded Hoagie Post Instagram

Email marketing played a big part in this sale, too. We sent out two email blasts that had direct links to each product and custom branding. These emails are the most opened emails we ever sent for the store, with the first one having a 52% open rate. You can view the email here.

We are thrilled the store did so well with the sales, and we are even happier that the customers loved these deals. We are looking forward to Labor Day Weekend promotions!