Are you ready with your seasonal marketing plan as Christmas approaches? If done correctly, this is one of the finest growth marketing options you can rely on to improve your sales. Seasonality affects many companies, whether it’s the forthcoming Christmas season, the summer vacation season, or any season in between.
For example, retailers frequently notice an increase in sales between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. In contrast, ice cream stores or hotels often see most of their business during the summer.
What Is Seasonal MarketingHow Seasonal Marketing Can Benefit your BusinessHow to Create a Seasonal Marketing StrategyWrapping Up
What Is Seasonal Marketing
Seasonal marketing is the practice of selling your products and services during specific periods of the year, such as Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day, Halloween, and Easter. The idea behind applying such marketing strategies is to target and profit on specific dates.
Determine the relevant dates in your sector to your company and create your seasons or holiday marketing strategies accordingly. Marketing plans around these days will help you attract more visitors to your website and increase sales.
How Seasonal Marketing Can Benefit your Business
Your business will benefit from seasonal marketing for a variety of reasons. Let’s explore most of them below:
Increase Possibilities for Advancement
Using seasonal marketing, you may increase your chances of promoting your goods or services all year. Every season or occasion offers a fresh opportunity and can help your overall marketing plan.
Boost the Group’s Inventiveness
Seasonal marketing may give you a chance to boost your imagination and keep your advertising current. Marketing strategies risk becoming stale or even predictable in the absence of fresh chances.
Seasonal marketing offers an opportunity to demonstrate both strategy and creativity, as marketing is both a strategic and creative undertaking.
Improved Consumer Reach
Using seasonal marketing, you may increase your chances of promoting your goods or services all year. Every season or occasion offers a fresh opportunity and can help your overall marketing plan.
Boost the Team’s Inventiveness
Seasonal marketing may give you a chance to boost your imagination and keep your advertising fresh. In addition, seasonal marketing offers an opportunity to demonstrate both strategy and creativity, as marketing is both a strategic and creative undertaking.
Better Reach Consumer
You can stay where your customers are during these times by updating your strategy according to the seasons. These clients then become enthusiastic about your discounts and the possibility of saving, becoming devoted supporters who recommend you to others.
Other benefits of developing and carrying out seasonal marketing strategies are:
Increases your income and product sales.Draws in both present and potential clients.This leads to further recommendationsCauses a rise in demand.Engages emotionally with customers.Additional chances for making customised promos are created.
How to Create a Seasonal Marketing Strategy
While every firm is different, there will be certain commonalities in creating a seasonal marketing plan. However, before you begin, understand your target and consumer profiles. Understand your market segment, product or service demand, and the messaging you want to express. Consider combining the following nine steps into your seasonal marketing strategy:
Add Your Creative Touch
Examine the items or services you now provide and get inventive. Consider methods to add more fun and how you will advertise them. Which ones may be dressed up for the season? How can you promote anything to coincide with a specific time of year or popular holiday?
If you sell things that would make a terrific Mother’s Day present for moms, launch a campaign around those products with a Mother’s Day theme. If a book you offer can be advertised as the ideal graduation present in some way, do it throughout the graduation season. Think outside the box and develop unique methods to market your products or services throughout the year.
Reiterate Prior Effective Marketing Initiatives
Examine previous effective seasonal campaigns, then implement them again. Keeping them the same may benefit you, or you can alter them by making minor or major tweaks per current trends.
Some businesses currently conduct the same campaign every year during particular seasons. As a result, customers start to anticipate these periodic sales, eagerly await them, and seize the opportunity to take advantage of them.
Increased brand loyalty and a rise in the number of new clients who show interest in the offer are two advantages of repeating such prior successful campaigns. Black Friday is a terrific opportunity to repeat a well-known seasonal marketing campaign that will have people looking forward to and actively searching out the deals you provide.
Pay Attention to Social Media Content
Unsurprisingly, a successful seasonal marketing strategy will depend heavily on your engaging social media content. Your social media should follow the same strategy as whatever you advertise on your website, email list, blog, or other platforms.
For example, offer freebies, solicit user-generated material, or promote interaction by including polls, quizzes, or other interactive content. If done well, you may anticipate increased website traffic, a more significant influx of new email subscribers, better consumer interaction, a rise in brand awareness, and an uptick in interest in your seasonal incentives.
Encourage the Use of User-generated Content
Particularly on social media, user-generated content is a valuable marketing tool. Encourage your fans to produce seasonal content as a component of your seasonal marketing plan. Give your audience rewards for using your product in images or publishing social media content that promotes your company.
Encourage them to identify your company and utilise particular, bespoke hashtags so that you promptly know the post’s existence. Then, with permission, repost the material and make it a fun component of your marketing strategy.
Create a List of Seasonal Email
Creating a seasonal email list should be your goal to focus. When it comes to specific seasonal email lists, you may take advantage of the ongoing growth of your email list. First, create opt-in possibilities that are appropriate for each season or holiday, then categorise and divide the new sign-ups into groups based on their interests, seasons, and holidays.
Access to sneak peeks, special offers, early-bird discounts, or anything else you believe will catch their interest and entice them to sign up can be included in these opt-ins. Once you have a seasonal email list, you can retarget it with promotions and content appropriate for that season.
Establish and Publicise a Page for Seasonal Goods
Don’t make website users search for the goods or services that are most suited for a particular holiday or season. Instead, group all seasonal goods on a single page. Additionally, doing this can make it simpler to advertise seasonal goods on your website, blog, and social media accounts.
Share articles and perhaps even design a pop-up for your website. Finally, direct your visitors to a carefully curated collection of holiday-appropriate products to make the gift-buying process easier.
Use a Countdown Timer Pop-Up
Encourage clients to count the days before your upcoming seasonal promotion or event and observe how enthusiasm and anticipation take control. Also, use a countdown timer pop-up on each page of your website to advertise a seasonal discount before it begins.
Visitors are more likely to return to your site after seeing these timers because they catch their attention and elicit strong feelings. You might even want to include a button in the pop-up that allows customers to book a table or add an item to their online shopping cart for later.
Strengthen Social Proof with Seasonally Relevant Testimonials
Customer reviews are social evidence, and as such, they may increase your sales.
Consumers increasingly prefer recommendations from actual people to being marketed to via marketing content. So instead, find user reviews focused on relevant seasonal items and topics across the seasons. For each season, include these on your product pages.
Seasonal testimonials are written by pleased customers who have purchased one of your products and describe how they felt while using it or how it changed their season.
Create Seasonal Competitions or Games
Holidays and seasons signal change, so celebrate them by giving your audience a fun seasonal game. By doing this, you may differentiate yourself from the competitors and ease the temptation to appear severe and too sales-oriented.
Find inventive methods to engage your audience by incorporating seasonal events into games and contests. For example, make one award a coupon or discount code and inform the winner that they will be eligible to win more if they use it within a certain amount of time.
You may also develop interactive material, like a quiz that only accepts responses from your website. Such contests and games have the advantage of increasing brand contact, which may improve sales and have a positive impact on your SEO, helping you rise in organic search results.
Wrapping Up
Your strategy may benefit from including a seasonal marketing plan because it will increase brand awareness, customer engagement, and sales year-round. Use it to develop new offers, create seasonal incentives, and personalise your messaging. You can also use it to create seasonal games and user-generated content opportunities to make your customers’ days more enjoyable.