For many businesses, marketing — while important year-round — yields more significant results during certain times of the year. Marketing can be more effective when your company caters to significant events and holidays.
To maximize your ROI from special events or promotions, it's vital to market ahead of time. Seasonal marketing should be a key component of your overall marketing plan for the year.
What is Seasonal Marketing?
Seasonal marketing is known as "any promotion that businesses create for certain times of the year or sales seasons."
Whether you have a seasonal brand or not, it’s helpful to anticipate your busiest times of the year. You can determine your “seasons” by looking at peaks in revenue or the usual anticipatory times when consumers are known to shop the most. These times of year make the most sense to focus on campaigns.
Creating a Seasonal Marketing Strategy
Whether you need to develop one from scratch or want to tweak your existing strategy, here are five key steps you can take to maximize your plan's effectiveness.
1. Use Seasonal Marketing Data When Creating Your Strategy
It's vital that you know when your busiest season occurs before you can effectively plan your marketing around it. Granted, most businesses have a general idea of when their peak sales periods start and end. However, looking at your marketing data can help you to pinpoint the best times to deploy your campaigns.
For example, a beach resort may get the most reservations during the summer months — but when do consumers begin researching and planning their vacation? In this scenario, it may best to step up marketing as early as January or February!
2. Create a Schedule
Seasonal marketing is not something you want to leave to chance. It's important to develop your plan for the year well in advance. This will allow you to budget appropriately and give you a 'cushion' in case any last-minute changes need to be made.
3. Research Your Competition
You can look at your top competitors for inspiration in executing effective campaigns. Of course, you can also examine their tactics to see if there are any gaps you can exploit. For example, are your competitors investing heavily in search engine marketing (SEM) but shying away from social media? Perhaps you can use that trend to generate buzz around your promotions.
4. Tap Into Your Creative Side
No matter what business you're operating, odds are the competition is stiff. Every retailer tries to grab shoppers' attention before Black Friday and Cyber Monday; every gym tries to leverage New Year's resolutions to increase sign-ups, and every chocolate company tries to move as much product as possible for Valentine's Day.
The point is it's important to stand out from the competition by being creative with your marketing.
Some examples:
- Have fun with your customers by hosting prize contests
- Publish content that puts a new spin on the season
- Create unique, out-of-the-box offers
Keep looking for creative ways to engage with your consumer base, and you'll likely receive more attention come peak season.
5. Continually Analyze Your Performance and Look for Ways to Improve
It's important to occasionally check in with your marketing performance and see where things are going well and where improvements need to be made.
For instance: Which ads are performing the best and bringing in the most conversions? Even if you are getting plenty of traffic to your website, is it the right kind of traffic? If you are still not seeing conversions and that's your main goal, then you may need to change your tactics. You can use these and several other metrics to make real-time alterations to your original plan. The key is to remain flexible and be willing to change your original plan if it's clear a change is in order.
Partner with CoxNext for All Your Marketing Needs
Seasonal marketing is vital for companies to maximize their revenues during peak times. Using data to craft your strategy, create a comprehensive yet flexible schedule, research the competition, get creative, and analyze your performance, you can execute a winning seasonal marketing campaign to help you reach your business goals.
If you need assistance developing or executing an effective marketing plan, reach out to our team of experienced professionals at CoxNext today to begin the conversation. We can help you plan and implement your marketing campaigns for exceptional results!
