Seasonal marketing can give your brand a boost and engage with your customers in a fun and festive way. Whether your business is part of a seasonal industry or not you can still put the season to work for your brand. Check out these seasonal promotional ideas that can benefit any business.
Create a Plan
Carefully plan everything out ahead of time. Figure out what you want to do and get everything ready. Plan out the details of any promotions or special offers that will be available. Determine the timing for newsletters and follow up communication.
View the Entire Plan
An organized campaign is easier to implement. Viewing the entire campaign as a whole will allow you to see if there are any gaps, issues or inconsistencies. This is an easy way to ensure branding and language is consistent across all digital outreach, mailers, signs you plan to display in your store or other forms of communication.
Track the Results
Keep track of everything you do and how your campaign preforms. Pay attention to the open rate of newsletters and how many likes and shares social media posts receive. Recycle the successful ideas next year and rework the not so successful ideas for future use.
Get a Head Start
Start your seasonal campaign early to ensure your message stands out from the rest. Waiting too late may cause your message to be lost with the rest of the seasonal outreach put out there by your competitors and other brands. For instance, for a spring promotion start your outreach in late winter.
Be Mindful of Timing
Tread carefully when choosing to begin outreach. Getting your message out there early offers a whole host of benefits, but there may be push back if you are too early. Promoting your Black Friday sale right after Labor Day, or just before Halloween may be too much for most customers. Putting your campaign into action too early can backfire.
Update Your Look
Give your branding a seasonal update. Change the colors or add seasonal design elements to your logo, the header of your newsletter template and your social media profile pictures. Make it fun and make sure to change everything back as soon as the season changes. For instance, if you update your logo to reflect Halloween and leave it up past October 31st it will look dated quickly.
Create Seasonal Memes and Marketing Images
Social media is very visual. Strong images draw people in and make them click on links that direct them to your blog and website. All of your social media posts should feature images, and you can easily create your own images using programs like Adobe Spark. Use fonts and colors that reflect the season and make sure to add your seasonal logo to the images you create.
Update Product or Service Offerings
Add a seasonal product or service to your lineup that will appeal to your customers. A retail business can offer gift wrapping during the lead up to Christmas, a bakery can include pumpkin flavored offerings in the fall and more. This promotion should appeal to and get customers excited. This is a great way to maybe even entice customers that are hesitant about your products or services to check things out and make a purchase.
Get a Partner
Coordinate efforts with another local business in a non-competing industry to join forces for the season. For example, a bakery and a coffee shop can offer their customers a coupon to the other business. An auto mechanic and a car wash can promote one another. This will help drive customers to the other business.
Check Out the Competition
Keep an eye on what your competition is doing to mark the season. Track what efforts work and what fails to hit the mark. Take notes and document everything, so when you start to pull together your plan for next year you can implement what you learned this year. Adapt and borrow ideas from your competitors to include in your seasonal marketing campaign.
Trend Watch
Sometimes successful outreach is based on a trend. Still document examples of social media posts from your competitors and yourself that go viral. Remember that if you recycle these posts as is next year they will likely fall flat. In some instances you might be able to repurpose them in a new and creative way to recapture some of the fun and viral qualities from previous outreach and campaigns.
Measure Performance
You can measure the success of your efforts against your competitors to get an idea of how well your campaign worked. Social media makes it easy to follow your local competition, as well as more distant competitors. Find businesses that offer the same products or services as your company, but in similar sized cities with closely matched demographics. Keep an eye on these competitors or similar businesses to gauge the effectiveness of their efforts. Thank you for reading our blog! How can we help you? Contact us today.
