As Christmas nears, are you ready with your holiday marketing plan? If you do it right, this is one of the best ways to grow your business and increase your sales. Seasonality affects a lot of businesses, whether it’s the coming holiday season, summer vacation, or any other time of year.
For example, between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, retailers often see a rise in sales. On the other hand, summer is usually the busiest time for ice cream shops and hotels.
How Does Seasonal Marketing Work?
Seasonal marketing is when you try to sell your goods and services around holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day, Halloween, and Easter. The point of these kinds of marketing plans is to target and make money on certain dates.
Find out what dates are important for your business in your industry and build your seasonal or holiday marketing plans around them. Plans for marketing that are available today will help you get more people to visit your website and make more money.
How marketing based on the seasons can help your business
Seasonal marketing is good for your business for a number of reasons. Let’s talk about most of them:
Boost your chances of getting ahead.
If you use seasonal marketing, you may have a better chance of promoting your products or services all year. Every season or event brings a new chance that can help your marketing plan as a whole.
Help the group think of new ideas.
Seasonal marketing may give you a chance to get creative and make sure your ads are up-to-date. If there aren’t any new opportunities, marketing plans could get old or even predictable.
Seasonal marketing gives you a chance to show both strategy and creativity, which is good because marketing is both a creative and a strategic task.
Better access to customers
If you use seasonal marketing, you may have a better chance of promoting your products or services all year. Every season or event brings a new chance that can help your marketing plan as a whole.
Help the team think of new ideas
Seasonal marketing might give you a chance to be more creative and keep your ads interesting. Also, seasonal marketing gives you a chance to show both strategy and creativity, since marketing is both a creative and a strategic task.
Better Reach Consumer
During these times, you can stay where your customers are by changing your strategy to fit the season. Then, these customers get excited about your discounts and the chance to save money. They become devoted fans who tell others about you.
Other good things about making and using seasonal marketing plans are:
- Helps you make more money and sell more products.
- attracts both current and possible clients.
- This leads to more suggestions.
- Causes a rise in demand.
- Engages with customers on an emotional level.
- More chances are made for making custom promotions.
How to Make a Marketing Plan for the Seasons
Even though each company is different, there will be some things that all of them have in common when making a seasonal marketing plan. But before you start, you should know who you are trying to reach and who your customers are. Know your market segment, the demand for your product or service, and the message you want to send. You might want to add the nine steps below to your seasonal marketing plan:
Put your creative spin on it.
Look at the products or services you already offer and come up with new ideas. Think about ways to add more fun and how you will get the word out. Which ones might have seasonal outfits? How can you promote something at a certain time of year or around a popular holiday?
If you sell things that would make great Mother’s Day gifts, make a Mother’s Day-themed campaign around those products. If a book you sell can be advertised in some way as the perfect graduation gift, do it during graduation season. Think outside the box and come up with creative ways to market your goods or services all year long.
Repeat successful marketing efforts from the past.
Look at seasonal campaigns that worked well in the past and then use them again. Keeping them the same may help you, or you can change them by making small or big changes based on what’s popular right now.
Some businesses do the same campaign every year during certain times of the year. Because of this, customers start to look forward to these sales, eagerly wait for them, and jump at the chance to take advantage of them.
When successful campaigns from the past are repeated, brand loyalty goes up and the number of new clients who are interested in the offer goes up. Black Friday is a great time to repeat a well-known seasonal marketing campaign that will get people excited about the deals you offer and looking for them.
Unsurprisingly, your interesting social media content will play a big role in how well your seasonal marketing plan works. The way you advertise on your website, email list, blog, or other platforms should be the same way you advertise on social media.
For example, you could give away free stuff, ask users to submit content, or encourage interaction by adding polls, quizzes, and other interactive content. If you do it right, you can expect more people to visit your website, more people to sign up for your email list, better customer interaction, more people to know about your brand, and more people to be interested in your seasonal incentives.
Encourage the use of content made by users
User-generated content is a great way to market, especially on social media. As part of your seasonal marketing plan, ask your fans to make holiday-themed content. Give your audience rewards if they use your product in pictures or post about your business on social media.
Encourage them to mention your company and use custom hashtags so that you can quickly find out about the post. Then, if you have permission, you can repost the content and use it as a fun part of your marketing plan.
Make a list of seasonal email addresses.
Your main goal should be to make a seasonal email list. You can use the growth of your email list to your advantage when it comes to seasonal email lists. First, make sign-up options that fit each season or holiday. Then, put the new sign-ups into groups based on their interests, the season, and the holiday.
These opt-ins can give them access to sneak peeks, special deals, early-bird discounts, or anything else you think will catch their attention and get them to sign up. Once you have a seasonal email list, you can send them offers and content that fit the season.
Set up a page for seasonal goods and tell people about it.
Don’t make people who visit your website look for the best goods or services for a certain holiday or season. Instead, put all the goods for the season on one page. This can also make it easier to promote seasonal items on your website, blog, and social media pages.
You could also make a pop-up for your website or share articles. Lastly, point your visitors to a carefully chosen group of holiday-themed products to make it easier for them to buy gifts.
Use a pop-up timer that counts down.
Encourage your customers to count down the days until your next seasonal promotion or event and watch how excited and interested they become. Also, use a pop-up countdown timer on each page of your website to let people know about a seasonal sale before it starts.
When people see these timers, they are more likely to come back to your site because they draw their attention and make them feel something. You might even want to add a button to the pop-up that lets customers book a table or add an item to their online shopping cart for later.
Seasonally relevant testimonials can help build social proof. Customer reviews are a form of social proof, and as such, they might help you sell more.
People are becoming more and more likely to trust recommendations from real people over marketing content. So instead, look for user reviews that focus on seasonal items and topics that are important throughout the year. Put one of these on each of your product pages for each season.
Seasonal testimonials are written by happy customers who bought one of your products and wrote about how it made them feel or how it changed their season.
Make contests or games that fit the season.
Holidays and seasons are signs of change, so mark them with a fun holiday or season-themed game. By doing this, you may stand out from your competitors and be less likely to look too serious and sales-focused.
Use seasonal events in games and contests to come up with creative ways to get people interested. For example, you could give one winner a coupon or discount code and tell them they can win more if they use it within a certain time.
You could also make something interactive, like a quiz that can only be answered on your website. Having more people interact with your brand is a benefit of these contests and games. This may increase sales and help your SEO, which will help you move up in organic search results.
Wrapping Up
A seasonal marketing plan could help your strategy because it will raise brand awareness, customer engagement, and sales all year long. Use it to come up with new offers, come up with seasonal incentives, and make your messages more personal. You can also use it to make seasonal games and ways for customers to create their own content to make their days more fun.