Many components go into an effective marketing strategy: promotional tactics, your central brand messaging, data on target demographics, and other key elements. Seasonal messaging can – and in many cases should – be an essential part of your overall strategy. As marketers, we tend to get caught up with data points and metrics, but seasonal marketing is also an opportunity to let your hair down and inject a bit of cheer into your brand.
A “season” in the marketing sense can be about anything. Not just spring, autumn and holidays like Halloween and Easter, but also generally recognized events like Black Friday and Presidents Day. These types of events have the potential to drive major website traffic, as well as sales, leading up to them. With that in mind, here are the main components necessary to build a seasonal marketing strategy.
Define the Scope of Your Seasonal Marketing Strategy
It always helps to outline your goals in advance, including the seasons, holidays and times of year that will be incorporated into your general brand strategy. Your seasonal marketing strategy can include any promotional material or activity developed for certain times of the year or sales seasons. Ideally, any seasonal messaging or celebrations will need to align with your organization’s larger business goals. These marketing campaigns should serve to leverage the high traffic leading up to summer or the weeks approaching the beginning of the school year.
Create a Separate Email List
Just like with other target audience sub-lists, you need a seasonal email list. This doesn’t necessarily mean starting from scratch, though. Throughout the year, particularly during moments of increased traffic, marketers should be tagging individuals according to their seasonal interests. Doing so will help them create a separate sub-list of names, or multiple lists, that they can add to later with additional names of potential customers.
Build Anticipation for the Holiday, Season or Event
It’s not enough to incorporate fall colors into your October e-newsletter or holiday gift wrapping. Marketers should keep an eye out for ways to maximize their efforts, such as counting down to an event or promoting products that are most closely related to the seasonal theme. Companies that sell diverse products or services can tailor their offerings to fit the theme. Narrow your focus to stay on target, highlight what is relevant and remain consistent with the campaign.
Customize Your Brand’s Materials
Persuading customers and other stakeholders is part of any marketing plan. Customizing your product guides and other materials is an important part of this process. But customization should also be fun. Some stakeholders will be persuaded by your data, while your target audience may respond more to soft persuasion. Customization is also a chance to reinforce dates, attractive deals, upcoming events and pertinent information that will attract more social media followers.
Incorporate Other Seasonal Marketing Techniques
If people sense you’re only about making bucks your idea will die on the vine. Seasonal campaigns are opportunities to get creative with your brand and include features and events that will entice participants and inspire them in some way. More and more, people like and trust authenticity. One helpful strategy is to incorporate quality assurances from past shoppers or neutral outsiders who will be trusted. Then you can insert other tactics, like exclusive deals, to build anticipation in the weeks leading up to the holiday.
Take a few other seasonal-marketing tips from the pros:
- Entice early shoppers with offers or discounts.
- Mention upcoming events in popups on your site.
- Use testimonials from last year’s event.
- Use games or contests to attract more viewers.
- Stay engaged to rectify any problems.
- Conduct after-event surveys for feedback on what worked and what didn’t.
Lean on Your Digital Marketing Partner for Social Media Support
Many growing companies lack the time and resources to fulfill every aspect of their seasonal campaign. That’s why more brands in every industry work consistently with a marketing partner who can pick up the slack now and then. An outside specialist can help with whatever tools may be lacking – whether it’s customizing your website to the season, incorporating messaging into your socials, or setting the right tone for your audience.
Contact Connections Marketing for a free consultation about your marketing goals, seasonal and otherwise. We will review what you have done in the past, learn more about your goals for the future, and share our vision for helping you achieve them.