With every season comes a new marketing opportunity, with activity focused on something topical and current.
Marketing strategies are often led by the external environment, and seasonal promotions are a key tool to adopt in your campaigns.
Looking into consumer behaviour is vital, tailoring your marketing efforts to their preferences, but when you combine this with a seasonal marketing campaign, you’ve created a strategy that can focus on a niche, whilst also having the potential to call out to a new audience.
What is seasonal marketing?
Seasonal marketing refers to marketing strategies that focus on specific times throughout the year – seasons, in particular.
This can involve holiday-specific promotions, or perhaps working with the natural seasonality of your business in mind, depending on the industry.
With various events and holidays taking place throughout the year, there is ample opportunity for businesses in all kinds of industries to create tailored marketing campaigns to capitalise on these key dates.
Why should you create seasonal strategies?
Being consistent with your marketing is important to ensure a constant stream of messaging and to maintain engagement with your audience.
However, taking advantage of increasing demand during certain periods, or using seasonal times for inspiration for a fresh marketing campaign, can have significantly positive impacts on your revenue
Perhaps you’re aiming to increase website traffic, raise awareness of your brand, reach new audiences, or increase sales? Whatever your goal, this can all be achieved with a seasonal marketing strategy.
Examples of seasonal marketing strategies:
Seasonal marketing strategies can come in various forms, meaning your possibilities are endless...
Holiday promotions
Throughout the year, there are multiple holidays that you can use to your advantage to create themed content around. With Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter, and Halloween, to name a few, tailoring your sales to these times can play a significant role in your campaign’s success.
Holidays are also an emotional time for many, and this is the perfect opportunity to adopt a marketing approach which taps into these emotions. Engage with your customers on a more personal level, humanising your brand and allowing your audience to connect with you.
For further information on how to craft a successful seasonal holiday campaign, specifically a festive campaign, read our blog: Successful Festive Campaigns of 2022.
Summer campaigns
During summer, you can tailor your marketing to suit various summer activities, such as travelling or being outdoors, and you may find that in summer, people are more relaxed and open to new experiences, which may be useful to filter into your messaging and tone.
On the other hand, some businesses may find that summer is a time when their sales and engagement drop, whether that be due to people taking more holidays or spending more time doing recreational activities to make the most of the weather.
With this in mind, a push on your marketing strategies during the summer can enforce your brand in people’s mind, creating and maintaining awareness rather than sinking into the background behind competitors.
Winter campaigns
Similarly to the above, during winter, you can modify your marketing to suit winter topics where possible. This could involve playing on activities like winter sports or winter getaways, driving attention to your brand through current and popular occurrences based on winter-related themes.
Of course, with winter comes Christmas - one of the most important times of the year, especially for ecommerce businesses. At a time where customers are actively looking to make a purchase, utilising gift guides to target heightened demand is an extremely beneficial method within your seasonal marketing campaign.
New Year’s promotions
New Year’s promotions are often a popular choice for seasonal marketing, whether that be looking into promotions around kick-starting health journeys, like joining a gym, or playing on the idea of a “fresh start” - however your business and its services may link to this particular season, using it as a marketing strategy could generate positive attention.
Yet, with the knowledge that it is a popular time for campaigns, adopting an innovative, creative mindset here is pertinent to your campaign’s success, as to not let it get lost amongst the sea of marketing campaigns.
Be wary that your seasonal marketing campaign doesn’t fade into the abys
If your seasonal campaign lacks creativity and originality, it may then become too similar to your competitors’ campaigns, all jumbling into one – making it difficult to the consumer to decipher who is who.
In order to craft a successful seasonal strategy, the following tips can help with ensuring it captures your audience and converts them into potential customers.
Use data
Data is invaluable. It provides opportunity for you to understand your customers more, meaning you can create content around their preferences.
Analysing when your busiest season is, with peaks and troughs of activity, can guide you to know when might be the best time to promote more campaigns.
Look at competitors
Reviewing your competitors’ activity can be a vital tool to create stand-out seasonal marketing campaigns.
Not only can you gain inspiration from your competitors, but you can also identify their weaknesses or where they have fallen short, giving you a clear window of targeting opportunity.
Maximise Discounts
Seasonal promotions can be a great way to maximise sale periods. Create limited edition, seasonality-based discount codes to encourage the feeling of urgency and nurture your target audience to make the desired conversions.
Additionally, you can generate a build up to a large discount with a seasonal competition, sharing this across your communications channels.
Your social media channels are a vital part of promoting your sales to new and potential customers, and you can find out more about our talented social media agency and services.
Create a seasonal email list
Having a well put together email list is important all year round, but during times when you can capitalise on increased traffic, targeting a new or less active audience can be achieved. Seasonal interest may incentivise potential customers to engage with your brand, and creating an email list based of off seasonal sign-ups can provide to be extremely useful.
The Champions Digital team has a wealth of experience creating engaging email campaigns that generate results for clients in various industries. Find out how we can help you in your next seasonal campaign with your email marketing strategy.
Promote seasonal product categories
To ensure the website experience is as easy as possible for consumers, combine all seasonally relevant products into dedicated categories.
Not only can this streamline the user journey, providing customers with everything they need in one place, but it can also make your seasonal campaigns easier to promote, with dedicated landing pages to link back to.
Use SEO
Whilst SEO is typically considered a more "slow burning" marketing activity, it can be incredibly beneficial in driving organic traffic to support your seasonal campaigns.
Ensure you're utilising seasonal keywords within your website content to boost your SERP rankings at a time when your consumers are conducting seasonality-based searches in peak periods.
As a crucial element to online success, SEO is a tool that should not be under-estimated, and we have a strong team of experts who can build results-driven SEO campaigns for you – find out more about our SEO services now.
Multichannel campaigns
When creating your seasonal campaign, considering how you are activating your touchpoints is key. Through the use of multichannel campaigns, you can reach audiences across different platforms, which means you won’t be limiting yourself when aiming for maximum exposure.
With your multichannel campaign, ensure your messaging remains the same. Be clear and confident, and in the case of promoting a seasonal campaign, keep it consistent across the different channels – avoid confusing or overwhelming the consumer. It is vital to bear in mind the importance of tailoring your content to each channel, whether it requires more visual aid or more written content, for example.
Are you ready to create memorable seasonal marketing campaigns?
Champions has over 20 years of experience in delivering impactful seasonal marketing strategies and campaigns, and can work with you as an extension of your marketing team to generate the results you need to thrive.
With a multiservice approach to supplying our clients with every necessary step in their campaign, we are the holistic package. Drive your seasonal marketing campaign to success with the help of our strategy, digital, communications and creative teams, experts at perfecting your messaging and keeping it consistent across channels.
We can help you to create a successful, result-driven marketing campaign to align with any upcoming seasonal holidays, nurturing a process to gain and maintain customers. Contact us today to discuss your requirements and our team will be on hand to help.