Just as the seasons change and we get excited to change our clothes, activities, and favourite foods (hello, apple pie in autumn), marketing efforts also flux with the seasons. It’s a good practice to think about how you’ll promote your products differently at different times of the year, especially if you sell content or resources that align to specific holidays, trends, or months. Seasonal marketing campaigns can help you to make the most of customer’s existing knowledge and feelings throughout the year to enable you to sell more!
Skip ahead:
- What are seasonal marketing campaigns?
- What makes seasonal marketing campaigns different?
- 9 Seasonal marketing campaign tactics
- Bonus tips for creating your seasonal marketing campaign
- Conclusion
What are seasonal marketing campaigns?
Seasonal marketing campaigns are short-term promotional efforts that advertise something new, specific, or trendy related to the time of year. The purpose of this type of marketing is to have an engaging and fresh campaign that will inspire customers to purchase in the moment while also making use of their existing excitement for the current season.
33 Since seasonal campaigns are shorter and occur more frequently, there is more room for creativity, better ability to conduct experimentation, and faster reporting at the end of each campaign period. It’s also just a fun way to connect with your audience!
What makes seasonal marketing campaigns different?
Seasonal marketing campaigns are temporary and focused on something situational or unique to the current time of year. For example, it could be about a new product launch, educational video about a trending topic on social media, or in celebration of an upcoming holiday. They generally only last from a few weeks up to three months.
In comparison, general marketing campaigns may cover things like a product’s features or a topic in your niche that doesn’t have cyclical periods of popularity. They are ongoing conversations that you are trying to promote and sell. For example, the topic of leadership skills is not new and doesn’t have ebbs and flows of search interest. General campaigns will last at least three months and until the campaign no longer generates a high performance or is no longer relevant (eg. a product feature is removed).
9 Seasonal marketing campaign tactics
Work within a predetermined budget
The average cost to run a seasonal marketing campaign can vary widely, depending on the scale you’d like to promote it at, the tools you’re choosing to leverage, and the means of promotion that you’ve selected. For example, there is little to no cost to ask your sales team to offer the promotion in their pitches to customers. But if you’re aiming to have a digital billboard in a city center, the cost for that component alone can be around $15,000 per month.
To make sure that you’re not overspending, align on a budget as early as possible in your campaign planning process. When budgeting, an important metric to consider is the return on investment (ROI) that you’ll earn from your marketing investments. The higher you can get your ROI to be, the better!
Doing deep market research in advance
Conducting thorough market research helps you understand a lot about your target audience. You’ll learn where they prefer to learn new information, what marketing strategies work best on them, what information they’d like to learn, and even which competitors are already leading the way in your niche. There are plenty of tools like SurveyMonkey or Pollfish that can help you quickly build and distribute surveys to collect insights from your target audience. Here’s a research survey template to help you get started! Or, if you personally know someone who fits within your ideal customer profile (ICP), you can reach out to them requesting a short interview.
Build a clearly defined value proposition
The unique value proposition (UVP) is the core selling point that you’re making to the potential buyer. It should define why they should purchase your product at all or why they should purchase it over a competing product. Remember to lean heavily on the “unique” part of a UVP, meaning that yours should help you stand out compared to anything else available. Having deep knowledge from market research efforts will make sure your UVP is actually relevant and compelling enough to the buyer to encourage them to convert.
Some examples of UVPs include:
- Walmart offers the lowest priced items for cost-conscious buyers
- Uber offers a fast ride, available anytime to take you anywhere at an affordable price
- Yeti offers high-quality coolers that promise to keep your food or drinks colder for much longer
These examples are general brand UVPs, but for a seasonal marketing campaign you’ll also want to leverage more specific UVPs that relate to the current moment. For example, Walmart could slightly reposition their UVP around the Christmas holidays to focus on cost savings for gifts during a typically expensive time of year.
Learn more about Unique Value Propositions vs. Unique Selling Propositions in this blog here.
Create a sense of urgency
Compelling seasonal marketing campaigns need to create a sense of urgency. Since the advertising effort is supposed to be short-term and temporary, the messaging and promotion all need to align to the same shortened time frame, too.
For example, if you are selling a course about computer programming, you can promote it to future university students in August with messaging about the importance of getting ahead on coding knowledge before the actual school season begins in September. This communicates to the future university students that they have an opportunity to get ahead in their new academic venture, but only if they start learning before the end of summer. They will feel the sense of urgency because they will know when they need to convert by and why they need to convert by that point in time.
Include a special bonus in the promotion
Adding additional incentives like discounts, special prizes, or free gifts can help encourage any buyer who is on the edge of a purchase to finally convert. Consider the value of the course or product that you’re selling and ensure that you choose a promotional incentive that is proportionate in value.
For example, if you have an incentive to earn a free $15 waterbottle for the purchase of any course, students may feel more inclined to purchase a $50 course before a $200 course if it means they get the same waterbottle anyway. On the other hand, offering a free e-book related to the $50 course and a different free e-book related to the $200 course can be a great option to target multiple interests and provide unique promotional incentives that don’t interfere with another product’s ability to generate revenue for you.
Tell the campaign like a story
Many consumers are motivated by a story that explains the value proposition. Storytelling is an easy way to paint a picture about the problem that the potential customer might be facing and the solution that you provide for it. Each seasonal campaign should tell one unique story and all of the campaign’s collateral and promotional efforts should be aligned to that story. Great stories also invoke feelings, emotions, and a sense of urgency that will help the customer convert.
Looking back at the example about computer programming courses from above, the story in this campaign is focused on preparation for school in order to be the best student. The person engaging with the campaign might feel nervous for stepping up to a university classroom so the online course helps them feel confident ahead of time.
Use a variety of advertising and distribution channels
When you have a plan about the story you want to tell, who you want to tell it to, and why you want to tell it to them, you’re ready to start thinking about execution on your marketing campaign. If you’re new to marketing, it would be a good idea to take a beginner course to learn the fundamentals.
The most important component in the execution stage is deciding where to distribute your campaign message. You’ll need to find a channel that works within your budget, timelines, and ideally can give you direct reports on performance. A billboard, for example, can be more expensive, takes time to get installed, and is hard to measure conversions on.
But it can still be great if you’re looking to drive up brand awareness in your targeted area. On the other hand, digital advertising through social media or search engines has variable pricing depending on the competitiveness of your niche, can be launched within just a few minutes, and has detailed reporting on impressions, clicks, and conversions.
Here are some marketing distribution channels to look at and decide if they’ll work for you:
- Social media
- Organic social media posting
- Paid social media advertising
- Search engines
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Search engine advertising (SEA)
- Content marketing
- Lead magnets
- Blogs
- E-books
- Whitepapers
- Events
- In-person events like conferences or meet-ups
- Virtual events like webinars or online conferences
- Email marketing
- Affiliate marketing programs
- Newspaper or magazine ads (physical or digital)
- Billboards
- SMS advertising
Train the sales team in advance
If you have a sales team or if you’re the one doing the sales role, remember that this can be a distribution channel as you’ll have direct contact with any leads who have already signalled some interest in your offering. Inform sales members of your seasonal marketing campaign plan so that they can offer the promotional incentives to existing leads. You might also want to consider tailoring the incentive depending if the lead is hot, warm, or cold. Creating sales pages is a helpful way to communicate the unique value proposition of your campaign.
Make it easy for customers to convert
A successful seasonal marketing campaign is intended to earn revenue, sign-ups, or leads. Make sure that you have thought carefully about the sales funnel that outlines how your leads will find, contact, and engage with your brand while you are attempting to convert them into an official customer. Sales funnels can also include a plan for upselling or cross-selling existing customers to build loyalty. Here are 5 examples of sales funnels to inspire you!
Customers should easily be able to see the form or link to convert into a paid customer. If it’s too hard for them to find, they might skip out on purchasing from you at all. Making use of a lead generation platform can help organize and automate some of the work to create, collect, and manage new leads.
Bonus tips for creating your seasonal marketing campaign
- Plan according to the trends, but try to be unique. A lot of people will create seasonal marketing campaigns around popular holidays like Christmas, Valentine’s, and Thanksgiving. You should definitely leverage this time where customers are planning to spend more money than usual. This includes joining in on Prime Day, too if you sell or affiliate through Amazon. But since there is an overall increase in advertising efforts from anyone selling an offering, you’re going to need a creative campaign message to get through the noise and engage your target audience.
- Leverage other big names and partnerships where possible. As part of your marketing efforts, you can look into leveraging thought leaders, experts, and other brand partnerships to help you get attention. It’s a great way to leverage an existing audience created by the partner brand or expert. You can also use the partnership as part of the story behind your seasonal campaign!
- Remember to frequently reflect and optimize. Your first few seasonal marketing campaigns are likely to have a lot of new lessons learned. Document these insights to help you in future campaigns. Note down what works or what doesn’t work for various target audiences, marketing channels, and messaging. You can also conduct A/B testing to help accelerate your rate of learning to increase your campaign’s performance faster!
Conclusion
Running a successful marketing campaign involves a lot of thought, detail, and planning. But with a bit of practice and optimization it can soon be easy to repeat and scale this type of marketing effort. There are plenty of benefits like higher customer engagement, revenue returns, and ability to use your creativity when working on seasonal campaigns. If you’re producing new and trendy content, it’s also a great opportunity to leverage more thought leadership by leaning into important dates and milestones related to your niche. The possibilities for seasonal marketing campaigns are endless, so you have a ton of freedom and opportunity ahead of you!
