Why A Seasonal Marketing Strategy Is Crucial
Implementing seasonal marketing is one of the easiest ways you can inject some variety in your marketing materials and connect with users around what they’re focusing on right now.
The modern attention span is fleeting so addressing what users are most excited about is a great way to get them interested in what you have to say. Seasonal marketing enables you to capitalize on the buzz around national holidays throughout the year or local events in your community.
It can also help you make the most out of your marketing budget by adjusting your tactics and resources during your industry’s busy and slow seasons. Know when to focus your energies on building awareness, or pushing customers to finally convert.
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So What is a Seasonal Marketing Strategy?
I bet you can guess this one. A seasonal marketing strategy is one where your messaging, visuals, and creative content change based on the season. This doesn’t just mean you need to use pictures of snow in your ads during the winter months though.
A great seasonal marketing strategy is tailored to your specific community environment and industry. This means if you’re a local company, you’ll only need to create one seasonal marketing strategy. But if you’re a national (or even global) company, you will need to develop different seasonal strategies for your different regions and/or product lines.
“Measure Twice Cut Once” – Seasonal Planning is Essential
Planning and strategy are the best! Most people don’t spend enough time thinking things through before they start producing content. Hitting the ground running without a road map is a hard way to get where you’re going, and you’re more likely to end up somewhere you didn’t intend. It certainly isn’t the way to create thoughtful effective seasonal marketing strategies (or any marketing strategy for that matter).
Spend some time thinking through your goals and what tactics you want to use to get there. Then start developing the plan — both the creation of materials you need and how they’ll be distributed. I like to work backward when creating timelines to ensure that we aren’t leaving too much work close to a deadline.
Research is the first step in great planning
Aside from the usual national holidays like Valentine’s Day or the Fourth of July, find out what holidays your community leans in to locally. Maybe your city is known for throwing a massive Oktoberfest celebration. Or perhaps they go all out when the weather changes and certain flowers start to bloom (yes these are both super PNW-centric suggestions – I’m a product of my environment, but you get where I’m going here).
Look for opportunities around events, causes, and topics your city or region cares about and find ways to connect that to your marketing. That being said, these need to be authentic to your brand and in good taste – use your best judgment.
Thinking ahead will save you so many headaches
Seasonal planning can also prevent you from making knee-jerk marketing decisions to align with trending topics. Just because everyone’s talking about XYZ right now doesn’t mean you need to be, especially if it doesn’t clearly line up in some way with your brand, product, or message.
Off the cuff jump-ons to whatever the topic of the moment is can create some really bad brand faux pas. You don’t want to simply throw an ad at whoever is on that days’ trending hashtag thread. That’s not to say you can’t wade into a timely conversation, but be sensitive and thoughtful, and get feedback from your peers before jumping in headfirst. It’s easier to stay out of it, than clean up a mess after saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.
The flip-side of this is if you’ve scheduled content to be published (especially if you’re using a scheduling tool like HootSuite) and something tragic happens, you might need to jump in there and delay scheduled content for a more appropriate time.
Addressing Industry Seasonality and Social Media Ads Spend
Seasonal marketing isn’t just about changing your visuals and messaging. It’s also about adjusting your ad spend to capitalize on seasonally increased interest in your product or services.
Most of our partners set a regular monthly ad budget. This is a great place to start, but won’t necessarily bring you the most leads it could. Certain services and products are in much higher demand during certain times of the year, and you need to be increasing your ad budget for all points of the sales funnel during that time.
For Example…
You can capitalize on the increased search volume and traffic for your landscaping business during the spring and summer when people’s lawns become overrun with weeds and don’t want to spend every weekend keeping the grass at a reasonable length.
Then you can lower (but not turn off) your ad budget in the fall and winter and focus your energy activating your current customer base by bringing in happy customer reviews and encouraging referrals.
Additionally, producing quality content like blogs throughout the year that provide information for related topics on lawn care and landscaping is a great way to provide value to existing and potential clients. It helps your site rank for more keywords and shows Google that your site is active and authoritative. You can also use this content later to boost in paid social media posts.
We’re Just Getting Started – More About Seasonal Marketing
Eager to learn more about how to do seasonal marketing well? We’ll be talking about each season on its own over the coming weeks.
Each season offers its own specific opportunities and challenges (and even those change depending on who you’re trying to sell to and what your product is). We’ll take a look at each season and discuss the ways that you can make the most of them and what kind of seasonal planning you should think about for them.
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