Seasonal Marketing – Is it Worth It?
Have you ever wondered if seasonal marketing is worth the investment? With so many businesses incorporating seasonal marketing into their campaigns, it’s important to ask if this strategy is truly effective. While year-round relevance is crucial, neglecting seasonality can have detrimental effects on your business.
When it comes to planning your marketing campaign, there can be no getting away from the fact that seasonal marketing matters. Yes, it is important to have content that is relevant all year round, but if you neglect seasonality you are doing your business a disservice.
Companies the world over implement effective seasonal marketing plans. Whether they are looking to cash in on Christmas or ride the highs of the summer sun, adjusting your marketing message can see your business realising some great results.
It may be that you have never considered seasonal marketing for your business. If that is the case then it is certainly worth reading on. In this article, we are going to look at exactly what seasonal marketing is, why you should be embracing it, as well as how to implement it. Whether you operate B2B or B2C, you’ll see how seasonal marketing should matter to you.
What Is Seasonal Marketing?
Seasonal marketing is a strategy that involves tailoring your marketing campaigns to the current season. The purpose of this is to drive attention and traffic to your brand by leveraging the market throughout a range of ongoing events.
For example, blog content and marketing can become focussed on themes of love around Valentine’s Day, back-to-school in September, Halloween in October, Christmas in December, and so on.
There is no need for seasonal marketing to be restricted to a set day of the year like the examples above. As the name suggests, seasonal marketing can be relevant to an entire season. Certain times of the year produce different feelings and emotions amongst customers. Regardless of your sector, your customers are going to be experiencing different emotions when compared to winter. As a result, their priorities will shift and you need to be able to tap into this.
Why Is Seasonal Marketing a Good Idea?
The key to running a successful business is to work out what problems your customers have and to provide a subsequent solution. This is the driving force behind blog topic research – there is no benefit to writing about topics that nobody cares about.
The fact that seasonal events provide an easy way to leverage the market is a good thing. The calendar is doing the hard work for you. Understanding that consumers are interested in savings when Black Friday comes around isn’t lazy – it’s smart.
If you need figures to show you that seasonal marketing is worth the effort, you only have to look at our spending habits at Christmas. According to the Bank of England, each household spends around 29% more in December when compared to other months of the year. This equates to millions of pounds. Surely it makes sense to have a marketing plan in place that sees you getting your share?
Is seasonal marketing effective?
Seasonal marketing can be an incredibly effective tool for businesses of all sizes and industries. By tailoring your marketing message to specific times of the year, you can reach your target audience at the right time and in the right place. Whether it’s Christmas, Valentine’s Day, or summer vacation season, seasonal marketing allows you to tap into the buying habits and preferences of your customers. By doing so, you can increase brand awareness, drive sales, and build a loyal customer base.
One of the main benefits of seasonal marketing is that it allows you to stand out in a crowded marketplace. By offering promotions, discounts, or special products that are unique to a particular season, you can capture the attention of your target audience and differentiate yourself from your competitors. This can be particularly effective during key shopping periods, such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday, where consumers are actively seeking out deals and promotions.
Another advantage of seasonal marketing is that it can help you build a deeper emotional connection with your customers. By aligning your brand messaging with the values and emotions associated with a particular season, you can create a sense of nostalgia, excitement, or anticipation that resonates with your audience. This can help to strengthen brand loyalty and drive customer engagement. For example, a clothing retailer might create a winter campaign that celebrates cozy nights at home, while a travel company might promote summer getaways with friends and family. By tapping into the emotions and desires of your target audience, you can create a marketing message that is not only effective but also memorable.
How Do You Plan for Seasonal Marketing?
Planning is an important part of seasonal marketing. The first thing to consider is that there are two kinds of seasonal marketing and making use of both is a good idea:
- Long-term – this kind of seasonal marketing involves content, products, and offers that relate to longer-term seasonal events. For example, a football-related business could run a long-term seasonal marketing campaign throughout the Champions League tournament.
- Short-term – On the contrary, this kind of seasonal marketing involves content, products, and offers that relate to shorter-term seasonal events. For example, a bespoke greetings card business could run a short-term marketing campaign focussed on Easter.
To plan for these seasonal opportunities, each business will need to consider the expectations of their customers around specific times of the year and one-off events. For example, a clothing business must plan for long-term summer clothing content as well as short-term Black Friday clothing sales.
It’s important to make sure that seasonal content is effective as it tends to have a short window to deliver results. Content Conga’s Copywriting Service is a fantastic option for marketing as professional copywriters understand how to create high-impact, well-written content that hits the seasonal sweet spot.
How Do You Create Content for Seasonal Marketing?
Once you understand that seasonal content is a good idea, it’s time to put thought into action. Firstly, it’s important to realise that there are lots of seasonal opportunities beyond Easter, Halloween, Christmas, and New Year.
Every niche will have its own set of seasonal content – holidays, beach visits, festival season, markets, clothing seasons, fragrances, and so on.
You should treat seasonal content as you would any other. What you’re looking for is a mix of evergreen content that can rank well for a long time and new or refreshed content that keeps up with current trends. Further to this, you should plan to create your seasonal content a fair while before it becomes relevant as it can take time for search engines to rank it.
Of course, it can be difficult to balance the creation of everyday content, seasonal content, marketing, and social media requirements without sacrificing quality. Outsourcing content to professional copywriters allows you to maintain high standards across the board while generating enough content to satisfy both seasonal and regular consumers.
Is Seasonal Marketing Right For My Business?
In a word, yes! No matter the sector you operate in, or who your customers are, you need to be paying attention to seasonal marketing. If you choose to ignore this then you are allowing sales opportunities to slip away. These are opportunities that your competitors will only be too keen to snap up.
It could be that your company operates in B2B sales and you are struggling to see how seasonal marketing is relevant to you. Often this form of marketing is mistaken for one where the sole focus is on selling Christmas gifts to consumers. With this belief, it is understandable that B2B companies may feel that seasonal marketing isn’t for them.
When approached correctly though, B2B companies can still benefit from this marketing strategy. How? By reviewing your customers’ habits and patterns. When are their quiet periods? Can you tailor offers to give them a boost? Can you generate ideas that will allow them to plan for their busy periods? Almost all businesses have seasonal ups and downs. As a B2B company, you can assist your clients all year round.
How Can You Ensure That Your Seasonal Marketing Works?
It should be clear that seasonal marketing is something that your business should be doing. We have already considered how you can generate the content that you need. Beyond this, what else do you need to do to ensure that your seasonal marketing campaigns are successful? Here’s a look at some tips that can help:
Tap into your data
If your business has been up and running for any length of time, you will have already generated plenty of useful data. Many businesses will simply fail to put this to the best use, but much of the data that you’ll have gathered can be highly useful when it comes to your seasonal marketing strategy.
There may be obvious times of the year when your business is busy and clear times when things slow down. By looking at your data you can see exactly when these periods are and exactly how much interest in your business varies.
It is not just about looking at your turnover at set times of the year. Useful information can come from Google Analytics. Here you can see when certain pages of your site get a boost. How soon before a key event do people start visiting your site? How far in advance do you need to plan for the next season?
Using Google Trends can also be useful as, rather than just looking at your own site, you can see how popular certain search terms are throughout the year. Plenty of data exists to allow you to effectively plan your seasonal marketing.
Get creative
You’re obviously not the only business that is operating in your sector. That means that you’re not the only one going after a slice of the seasonal pie. When it comes to planning your seasonal marketing campaign you need to consider how you are going to stand out.
You could develop eye-catching images that stand out from the crowd. You could approach your written content in a different way and try for humour. You may even go the opposite way and add a more serious approach and align this with a charity. As long as it makes you stand out, it doesn’t matter which approach you take.
Another method worth exploring is tapping into your existing customer base and running competitions. What giveaways can you run? How can you generate a buzz and get people talking about what your business has to offer? Let your imagination run wild and see what you can come up with.
Get spying
How can you stand out from your competitors if you have no idea what their seasonal marketing campaign looks like? Part of planning your strategy involves taking a look at those who are already succeeding in your field.
You’re not looking at the competition so you can blatantly run with their ideas. You are assessing their campaign and looking at how you can deliver something even better. What have your competitors done well? What mistakes have they made? Are there certain areas that they seem to have completely ignored?
You can learn a great deal from the competition and make sure that your seasonal marketing is free from their failings. You can ensure that you are head and shoulders above the crowd and that you are the go-to company in your field.
Use your time wisely
When is the best time to plan for your busiest season? During the time when trade faces a downturn, of course. No one in the midst of the busiest time of the year has time to be planning a seasonal marketing strategy. This should be planned months in advance.
It is during this time when you should be reviewing the data. You should be looking at how you can embrace creativity. You should be checking out the competition. You should also be assessing how your past campaigns have performed and be looking at ways to improve going forward.
No business looks forward to their quiet periods, but this is time that can be used to great effect. By taking the time to create your marketing plan, you can ensure that your busy periods become busier than they have ever been before.
Never stop marketing
It is too easy to look at seasonal marketing, plan for your busy periods, and then think that the job is done. By doing this you may well be boosting your best seasons, but you’re allowing your quieter ones to become even quieter.
Seasonal marketing will look different for each sector, but what all businesses have in common is the need for constant marketing efforts. Evergreen content is still important and it shows your customers that you still exist even when the busy season has gone.
When you look at social media, there is a need to be constantly active. Just appearing once or twice a year for your busy periods is hardly going to help with engagement. Who wants to engage with a social media page when it remains blank for half of the year? Keep your marketing message running all year so that you are always in the minds of your customers regardless of the season.