Your customers’ buying behavior and purchasing power change drastically with the seasons. Knowing how to take advantage of seasonal trends and tailor your marketing campaigns to different festive and seasonal periods is key if you want to grow your business. Not only are people generally more receptive to advertising and marketing information during these times, but their willingness to make purchases and the goodwill a brand is able to build during these times mean having your advertising campaigns optimized to take advantage of this.
Here are four things you can do to make sure that your seasonal advertising campaigns are as effective as possible.
-
- Create a Seasonal Marketing Calendar
Having a template for each advertising season throughout the year that you use to gather ideas and create mock-ups for potential campaigns allows you to play with themes and potential tactics to maximize your sales during a given season. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Halloween, Easter, each holiday contains a myriad of cultural queues, languages, and shared knowledge. Appealing to the sentiments of the season and the different cultural, sporting, or climatic events surrounding each one allows for a wide range of creative tactics to really make an impact on your audience and connect your product or service to the time of year.
-
- Construct your Seasonal Marketing Campaign
Once you’ve established which seasonal promotions make sense for your business and your budget, formulate a plan. Are you spending seasonal advertising dollars in order to attract new customers? Are you appealing to existing clients, a similar demographic, or an entirely new demographic? Knowing who you are attempting to reach and the best methods of conveying your information can mean the difference between a successful or completely ineffective seasonal advertising campaign. Make sure that you have nailed down your logistics. Knowing the lead time for things like graphics and printing is as important a part of the execution as your amazing ideas.
-
- Make use of Less Mainstream Holidays
Marquis holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving are a part of any seasonal advertising strategy, but utilizing holidays throughout the year that are well-known but less celebrated, like Groundhog Day, present opportunities to capitalize on your audience’s desire to celebrate and commemorate something that might be off your competition’s radar and allows you direct access to a less tapped market.
-
- Make Sure That your Seasonal Marketing Campaign is Memorable
Every business will be trying to make its mark during the high season. It’s your job to stand out from the crowd by doing something unique or charitable in order to attract attention to not only your product but also the personality and heart behind the brand. A butcher shop might organize a turkey drive during Christmas or Thanksgiving, and a toy store might offer to donate a certain percentage of each sale to a local children’s charity or hospital. Making your seasonal campaign memorable will set expectations for the following season and can help to keep your brand present in your target market’s mind long after the season has come and gone.
Marketing based on the seasons is an effective way to really penetrate the market during times of the year when people are more receptive to sentimentality and emotional advertising. They are recurring cultural hallmarks that people look forward to year after year, and knowing how to make your business stand out during them can pay dividends for not only the rest of the year but years to come.
