14th November 2022

Seasonal marketing is when your business focuses your marketing efforts around the different holidays. It is by no means confined to just Christmas time either. To ensure you have the best campaign possible, you need to keep every season in mind. We’ve created a fool-proof guide that will help your business increase sales, reach new audiences and new heights!

Here are just some of the benefits that can come from a successful seasonal marketing strategy:

• Drive more traffic
• Create top-of-mind awareness for your consumers
• Enhance chances to convert one-time customers into loyal customers
• Increase sales
• Boost the team’s creativity

Understand seasonality for your business

Understanding when your busiest season occurs is the first step to creating a successful seasonal marketing strategy. It doesn’t make much sense to evenly distribute your marketing budget throughout the year, and many businesses aren’t lucky enough to have the budget to do so. We suggest analysing your site traffic and comparing it year to year to identify times when you see specific peaks in traffic, sales, and search queries - Google Analytics is a great tool for this!

The more data you are able to gather, the more relevant your seasonal marketing strategy will become for your audience. You can then use these data insights to focus on holidays that your audiences are most interactive with.

Stay on-brand

It's easy to get carried away by all the festivities throughout the year, but keeping your identity at the forefront of your marketing efforts is essential. Yes, it might be Reptile Awareness Day, but if your business sells lamps, it’s probably not all that relevant.

Whilst planning your posts, try to make sure that there is a clear and relevant purpose for the content that links back to your wider business goals. And by putting your own creative spin on your seasonal marketing campaign, it will give you a leg up on the competition.

Take a look at this Google guide for a more in-depth explanation on how to prepare for each season.

Planning in advance is essential

For seasonal marketing, time is of the essence. During your off-season, you should set time aside to plan your strategy for the upcoming holidays. The best seasonal marketing campaigns are meticulously planned over time, not thrown together at the last minute.

To organise your marketing activities and plans, a marketing calendar is essential. A quick search online will provide plenty of free templates that you can personalise to your own plan.

Having a content calendar means that if there are sudden changes in demand levels during your on-season, your business will already have a plan in place so you’re not left wondering what your next move should be.

Get festive with your keywords

Figuring out what people search for during the holidays is a brilliant way to structure your marketing strategy efforts. Keywords can make or break a campaign’s success. Here is HubSpot’s full guide on how to do keyword research for SEO. When you’ve collected this data, include those keywords strategically in headers, page titles, and meta descriptions to yield the best results.

Google Trends is a great starting point for this. Take a look below to see how the keyword ‘flower delivery’ fluctuates throughout the year.

Unsurprisingly, you can see this keyword peaks during Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day.

By keeping a keen eye on keyword seasonality trends, you will create an effective campaign that speaks to your consumers. Targeting keywords that no one is searching for is a waste of your precious time, so remember to do your research beforehand.

Encourage user-generated content

Okay, not all of us are lucky enough to have the budget to create a tearjerker of a Christmas advert like John Lewis, but there are budget-friendly alternatives. To create a successful seasonal marketing strategy, promoting user-generated content (UGC) is a winning move.

UGC is any content that has been created and shared by a user based on their opinions, ideas, or feedback. It helps to establish brand loyalty and helps boost your social media reach. The proof of its effectiveness is in the numbers, with 77% of consumers saying they are more inclined to purchase a product or service from brands that use UGC.

A great example of this is Spotify's end-of-year campaign: Spotify Wrapped. It gathers the user's music data throughout the year and presents it in highly shareable, attractive, and colourful formats.

User-generated content will inspire more consumers to upload content in hopes of being featured on your page. It also puts your customers at the front and centre and helps to authentically grow an engaged community.

Observe your competition - but don't copy them!

Anyone who has worked in marketing will know all too well that competition is fierce. Researching your competitors will give you a clear insight into what your customers like to engage with. Whilst it’s important to keep an eye out for what they are doing, don't copy them! Try to put your own creative seasonal spin on your services or products. For example, every gym will be capitalising on New Year’s resolutions to get people to sign up, so what do you do to stand out from your competitors? Harnessing the voice and personality of your brand will help to elevate your marketing efforts.

Is your brand holiday ready? If you need help with your seasonal marketing strategy, reach out to us today.