Every year brings embedded opportunities to increase sales, boost brand awareness, and enhance customer relationships. Seasonal marketing is key to aligning your marketing efforts with special times of the year, such as holidays and events, to capitalize on rising consumer enthusiasm.
What is Seasonal Marketing?
Seasonal marketing is the process of synchronizing your marketing efforts with specific times of the year when consumer enthusiasm is high. Holidays like New Year’s, Christmas, and Valentine’s Day are classic opportunities to tap into the collective emotional landscape of consumers.
Holidays are associated with strong emotions such as joy, love, and hope. Businesses can create a more meaningful and memorable connection with their customers by marketing products and services that target these emotions.
However, seasonal marketing isn’t just about holidays. Special events like the Super Bowl and seasonal opportunities like back-to-school shopping and Black Friday are other examples of opportunities to harness the power of seasonal marketing.
The aim of seasonal marketing is to increase sales and foster an emotional connection with your target audience. Keep reading for a step-by-step guide to kick-start your next seasonal campaign.
How to Plan a Seasonal Marketing Campaign
Here are five key steps to planning your seasonal marketing campaign.
1. Choose a Seasonal Opportunity
Selecting the seasonal opportunity to leverage is the first step toward a successful campaign.
Major seasonal events like Black Friday are always a safe choice for a campaign. However, you should research your target audience to find seasonal opportunities that resonate with your customers and their values. Review current seasonal campaigns.
Once you decide on a seasonal event to leverage in your campaign, it’s time to do some research on similar successful campaigns – Ahrefs and BuzzSumo are great places to start your research.
When evaluating past campaigns, look at how each piece of content was approached, distributed, the messaging, and the emotion involved.
As you validate the campaign, ask yourself the following questions: How did this piece use various types of content and distribution platforms? Is the message clear, and if so, what is it? What emotion does this campaign evoke in the user?
Gather insights by reaching out to journalists and digital publications in your field.
Search for platforms that may have covered campaigns you like and ask for feedback on what makes a seasonal campaign compelling from their perspective.
2. Plan for the Right Holidays to Market
Lucky for us marketers, every year comes with useful marketing opportunities in the form of holidays.
But what makes holidays ideal for marketing campaigns?
It’s the embedded positive emotions.
Holidays are generally positive times that generate warm feelings such as joy, nostalgia, and gratitude.
Marketing is about evoking positive emotions in your audience, and synchronizing your campaigns with marketing holidays allows you to ride the wave of good seasonal emotions and make customers feel comfortable purchasing your product.
According to a HubSpot survey in 2022 of 247 marketers, Black Friday and winter/holiday season were the most popular seasonal marketing events for planning future campaigns.
51.4% and 52.6% of respondents indicated plans to build marketing strategies around those holidays.
While Black Friday and winter holidays evoke different emotions, the marketing strategy to capitalize on the excitement of those times and positive feelings remains the same.
Of course, there are many other holidays to consider, and choosing the right holidays depends on brand values and objectives.
3. Set a Timeline
With seasonal campaigns, timing is crucial.
You should start your planning well ahead of the specified seasonal event, and you should create a timeline to execute each step of the campaign.
Generally, your content should be prepared, built, planned, and ready for press releases at least two months before the big event.
It may
Consider using a marketing calendar to streamline your processes and get your team on the same page.
When creating a timeline for your campaign, don’t forget about your audience. When is the best time to reach out to them? When will they be ready to share content or engage with the campaign?
4. Organize Your Assets
Your seasonal marketing campaign should include all major platforms, including social media, email, blogs, and outdoor advertising (if that’s your thing).
A campaign with wide coverage requires careful organization of assets. Your creative team should be guided on the assets needed for each channel and the required specifications and dimensions.
Important tip: an actionable and updated campaign plan document is helpful during this process. It will enable you to better organize the timing and frequency of content releases and keep your messaging consistent by providing a place for all your campaign assets and communications.
5. Reporting and Adaptability
Staying adaptable means prioritizing speed, collaboration, flexibility, and testing.
Reporting and reviewing your campaign’s performance during its execution is essential for maintaining the ability to adjust the campaign as it evolves.
Where is most of the traffic coming from? Which pages have the highest bounce rates? Which ones convert better? These are some examples of metrics that can guide your future strategy.
Don’t hesitate to make adjustments to your original plans. If the changes you make will ultimately improve the campaign’s success, why not do them?
Examples of Seasonal Marketing
Back-to-School Shopping
Company: Walmart
Walmart cleverly capitalizes on the back-to-school shopping opportunity.
What makes it great: Walmart smartly combines the urgent pressure of back-to-school shopping with an intriguing deal. Walmart offered last year’s prices on school supplies for this year, making for an exciting way to showcase its low prices, especially for consumers concerned about inflation.
Important tip: Don’t be afraid to get an early start. Walmart announced its 2023 back-to-school campaign on July 6 (very early if you’re a student, but timely if you’re a marketer), and it was planned months in advance.
Total back-to-school spending is expected to reach a record high of $41.5 billion, compared to $36.9 billion last year and the previous record of $37.1 billion in 2021. So don’t miss the opportunity to take advantage of this moment if your products fit the occasion.
Winter Holidays
Company: Starbucks
Starbucks holiday cups are almost as ubiquitous as the winter holidays themselves.
Every year, as the colder months approach, Starbucks launches a fun holiday cup to kick off the season. Starbucks has been leveraging this seasonal marketing opportunity since 1995, increasing brand loyalty while solidifying the tradition annually.
What makes it great: Starbucks offers its customers something fun to look forward to each holiday season with a new and cheerful design. They continually and effectively leverage the warm and supported feelings of the holiday season so that their seasonal marketing campaign has become a staple of the holidays.
Important tip: Consistency is key. If you can create a seasonal marketing campaign that you can execute each year (while keeping things fresh), your customers will look forward to it and open their wallets accordingly.
Summer Fun
Company: Target
Target is hitting the summer fun note with its seasonal #TargetDrop campaign.
TikTok star Hungry-Fam surprises his family with a pool party featuring Target’s summer products like ice cream, swimwear, and pool toys, all being sold from a mysterious rolling ice cream cart.
What we love: Target is tapping into the growing influencer marketing industry ($21.1 billion up from $16.4 billion in 2022) and carving out a broad seasonal space that isn’t tied to a specific holiday.
Important tip:
Task: Don’t be afraid to think big when crafting a seasonal campaign. It doesn’t always need a specific holiday to stand out in advertisements. A broader seasonal campaign can inspire a larger number of people.
Spring Cleaning
Company: OXO
As winter fades and spring emerges, a sense of refreshment and the desire to tidy up our spaces arise.
OXO supports this feeling with useful content to inspire people’s spring cleaning journeys. OXO’s contribution to this list illustrates how to handle seasonality from a marketing content perspective aimed at delighting and informing people.
What we love: OXO’s spring cleaning content perfectly aligns with the seasonal opportunity and brand values.
Important tip: Formatting your written content as a list (when appropriate) makes it easier for readers to digest and increases views.
Halloween
Company: Reese’s
Reese’s attempted to establish itself as the premium Halloween candy with the Candy Converter vending machine.
Reese’s seasonal marketing campaign featured a vending machine that allowed people to exchange unwanted candy (like plain chocolate and Almond Joy) for the desired peanut butter cups.
What makes it great: Reese’s Candy Converter was a creative gimmick that grabbed attention and boosted positive brand perception amidst seasonal excitement. Running a seasonal marketing campaign around Halloween was a no-brainer for a candy company, and the intriguing gimmick received significant media coverage.
Important tip: Temporary installations at locations can be excellent for drawing attention to your brand and generating media coverage. However, they can be challenging and costly to execute and require a high degree of creativity.
In conclusion
Leverage the power of seasonal marketing to your advantage. With the right mix of relevance, creativity, and timing, you can take advantage of major events – ultimately driving increased sales.
Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/seasonal-marketing-campaign-guide
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