Whether it’s the upcoming holidays, summer vacation, or any season in between, businesses have seasonal marketing opportunities. For some, this might mean marketing around holiday-specific promotions or sales. For others, this would be industry-specific dates like tax seasons or the end of the financial year.
Seasonal marketing is a good opportunity to change things up a little. It’s a good opportunity to tap into a trending topic, which we want to when we’re doing marketing, and it’s a good opportunity to connect with our audience in relation to a season or a topic that they are passionate about and connected with.
No matter which season affects your business, creating a marketing strategy specific to that time is an important part of capitalising on those busiest periods.
If you’ve decided that a seasonal marketing strategy is right for your business, here are some top tips on tapping into the power of seasonal marketing:
Identify your key seasons
Before we go through this and explore the opportunities that you have with seasonal marketing, I want you to grab your marketing planner and go through it month by month and note the key seasonal dates that might affect your business.
You might look at specific holidays like Christmas or Valentine’s or you might look at seasons like spring or summer. You want to make sure that you’ve jotted all of these dates down in your diary or your marketing planner.
Plan in the off-season
When you’re in the midst of your busy season, who has time to think about marketing? Fortunately, the off-season is the perfect time to put together your seasonal marketing campaign.
So if we’re looking at Christmas campaigns, September is definitely the time you want to be ramping up any of your marketing and PR campaigns for Christmas.
You also need to make sure that we’ve got the inventory and the stock to cope with the demand that comes with the marketing campaigns.
This is the perfect time to write and design meaningful content related to that season. And you can schedule them to be shared during your busy months, so you’re not scrambling to create blog posts, videos, and podcasts after long, busy days.
Adjust the tone and style of your message
The next thing when it comes to seasonal marketing is looking at the tone and style that people tend to relate with, and does that match your business tone and style, or are we going to have to flex a little to get into that seasonal messaging?
Take, for example, Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. They’re all about online shopping and helping people get a good deal. But if you’re going to run a bargain, is that going to devalue your brand or product down the track? You’ve got to look at that and go, is that going to work?
For me, my approach, particularly to Black Friday or Cyber Monday sale, is to launch something new and do it at a discounted price throughout the launch. You might be able to attract new customers by jumping into that seasonal marketing trend where people are looking for those amazing deals over Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Another scenario of seasonal marketing when you might need to adjust your message is if you’re going to close your business over a specific season, the last thing you want to be doing is ramping up your marketing.
The key here is forward planning, looking at key dates, and then working backwards.
Tap into the seasonal trends
Seasonal marketing is about going with the trends. We tap into the trends and we tap into the tone. We combine or adjust our messages depending on the season.
The other thing is, the seasons also often come with colours. If your marketing campaigns can tap into the colours, then that allows you to visually connect with your people using the right colours that would match the season.
Evergreen seasonal marketing
Where does seasonal marketing fit in with evergreen marketing? Well, hopefully, if your seasonal campaigns work really well, you can repeat them again and again.
It’s about using categories to group your seasonal campaigns, then using social programmers like MeetEdgar to schedule them out and drop them in and out. I love using MeetEdgar for being able to drop in a campaign or drop one out and being able to track results and see what works this year and then repeat them in the following seasons.
There are so many seasonal opportunities on the calendar. It’s all about noting them down, making the most of them, and then writing good evergreen content that you can use year on year to tap into seasonal marketing for you and your business.
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