Hello everyone, how’re you doing? I hope you’re doing rough and tough in your life. Let me ask you one thing. When is your birthday!

Well, you must be thinking why I’m asking this out-of-context question? But in reality, it’s not out of context, our birthday represents a special day for us in a year, and we do so many things to make it more special. We invite friends, cut cake, host a feast, and hang out with them, and the planning starts at least one month before. It’s the same with Seasonal Marketing.

When something special season comes we promote our products and services by portraying their marketing materials according to that particular season.

So, now the question is, what seasonal marketing is, and how to build a successful seasonal marketing plan with effective ideas to get the best out of seasonal marketing.

What is Seasonal Marketing?

Seasonal Marketing can be described as any promotion that is being done on certain days or times of the year. It refers to the marketing that revolves around special occasions like Holi, Diwali, Black Friday, Christmas, Eid etc. It is the marketing of products and services during these special points of the year.

We can also divide the special days into the following categories

Government or Official Holidays: In these holidays mostly comes festivals like Holi, Diwali, Makar Sankranti, Raksha Bandhan, Teej, Jayantis of Great Ancestors, Independence Day, Republic Day etc.
Non-traditional Holidays: These are not official but are celebrated by a large number of communities to spread awareness about the cause like Earth Day, Environment Day, Pollution Day etc.
Annual Cultural Events: Annual Cultural Events include Spring Break, Back-To-School, Summer Vacation, Winter Vacation Etc. These take place every year at the same time.

Seasonal Marketing doesn’t mean that it’s only done on special days, but we can divide a whole year also into different seasons and can update our marketing plan seasonally. As we see there’re mostly seasons considered summer, winter, fall and rain. So, we can update our marketing plan according to these seasons by updating our marketing materials for a unique and relative theme.

You can choose how you want to make it, and with which factors. Seasonal Marketing shouldn’t coincide with an ‘official’ event. It is necessary because some businesses perform well at certain points in the year and struggle on other days. So, seasonal marketing can help us in boosting our sales and getting the most out of the times when the customers are looking for our services and products.

So, now I hope you’ve understood why seasonal marketing plans can be a game-changing factor in our marketing plans. Creating seasonal marketing campaigns for our brand keeps our marketing plan fresh. Customers get excited by getting the special seasonal offer for the products they’re looking for.

How to Build a Seasonal Marketing Plan?

Creating Seasonal Marketing isn’t that hard, it’s simple if you’ve understood the concept of seasonal marketing. As aforementioned you can either create a seasonal marketing plan around special days or holidays, or you can make it for winter, spring, summer, rain, and fall. It depends on you and your business.

As we know that a seasonal marketing strategy isn’t general marketing but it is a customized marketing plan for a particular season. It can help us in boosting our brand awareness, and increase sales at intervals throughout the year.

Let’s build a seasonal marketing plan step by step:

Understand Your Niche and Audience

Understanding your niche and audience is a must in this competitive digital world. If you know who you’re marketing to and what’s the place of your business in the industry then it’ll be a focussed marketing campaign. We always run focused marketing campaigns to get better results.

For understanding our potential clients we need to create a customer profile on the basis of age, location, gender, profession, your customer’s expectations, pain points, and much more. This customer profile is called customer persona. If you don’t know how to create a marketing persona, then click here, the directed blog will help you in creating a marketing persona for your business.

A thorough understanding of your customers will help you in designing your products and services specific to your customer’s needs, and understanding your business’s niche.

Determine Goals

Without having a goal you’re not moving anywhere, so you should always determine goals in every aspect of your life.

Always determine what you want to achieve from a particular campaign, it’ll help you in tracking how successful your marketing campaign has been.

Goals keep you motivated, so ensure to determine some for your marketing campaigns.

Research Your Competitors

Researching your competitors and dissecting their successful marketing campaigns can help you a lot in building a successful marketing campaign of your own. Dissecting piece by piece their successful marketing campaigns you can know how they approach the audience for buying their services or products, and what tactics they are using to attract the visitors.

This will help you in giving a form to your seasonal marketing campaigns and using the tested marketing tactics.

Build Your Marketing Calendar

We should create a yearly marketing calendar including all the major events, and holidays. It’ll help you in keeping pace with the holidays and be on time. Include all the events, and big holidays, it’ll also help you create your content planner.

Plan Early: Time is of the Essence

Planning early can save you from last-moment anxiety, and irritation. As we all know that seasonal marketing is all about marketing around a specific time, so if time passes we can’t perform it. To be safe from missing out on the opportunity you need to plan everything in advance.

Plan your offer, the channels you’ll be promoting on, which assets you’ll be using, and what technicalities will be needed. So, you need to plan all these things in advance

Tap into the sentiment of the season:

You can tap into the sentiment of the season by putting a creative spin on products, services, and other offerings. For this, you need to understand the customer’s emotions, and how they feel about your brand.

For tapping into the sentiments of your customers, you can showcase to them the stories of your previous customers, and how they achieved the desired results through your products and services. Showcase your testimonials, and reviews to build trust and authority in the market. Offer something free to make them feel valued.

People don’t easily leave their previous brands, and move ahead to a new one because of their core beliefs, and what’s the way of changing beliefs without forcing them on the customers?

We all know that stories are easy to remember and make a larger impact on the human brain, so incorporating storytelling in seasonal marketing campaigns can help us in touching the audiences. It’ll make our brand memorable, recognizable, and trustable, and will help us in tapping the sentiment of the season.

Leverage Social Media and User-generated content

We should not forget the importance of social media, it can be included in every marketing strategy, as social media presence is the best way to showcase your company’s profile and marketing tactics.

As well your social media presence should reflect the seasonal marketing plan by having posts related to the overall marketing campaign.

You can send your social media users to your website or store from where they can buy your products, can create an atmosphere of excitement around the special offers you’re willing to provide, can drive users to the email list, and can engage with your users through giveaways and user-generated content.

User-generated content is the content generated by users through participating in different types of competitions. This is a great way of engaging with your users and using their created content by giving them credit for it. They also enjoy these types of events because they’re actively participating in the competition and interacting with the business. You can incentivize the whole campaign to perform particular tasks.

Maximize Your Discounts

Who doesn’t like discounts? I don’t know about you, but I feel so much happier when I get something at discount.

Well, this is also a marketing tactic of providing a discount on a particular occasion or season sales. You can also make this part of your marketing campaigns. Keep discounts on your products and services according to the seasons

One thing you need to remember is always keep your discounts percentage-wise (50%), not like 50$ etc. It impacts so much. Percentage sign makes customers believe that they’re having a great deal. 50% look more than 50$, even when they’re equal.

Host a Giveaway

Giveaways are the best way of getting the data from your user in return for some free usable materials. Hosting a giveaway isn’t all about giving your users something, but giving something valuable that can have value in their life.

So, the service or product you’re providing in a giveaway should be useful to your users. Giveaways can help you in growing your following, and spread brand awareness.

Always host a season-centric giveaway to support the seasonal marketing campaigns.

Don’t Try to Be the Best: Make Yourself Unique

Don’t try to be the best, as if you’re trying to provide the same deal as your competitors are providing with better benefits, then your customers will compare your brand to your competitors. So, to avoid this problem you need to be unique. Make a unique deal for your customers that they can’t get at any other time during the year. You can also provide a limited-time edition product that’s only valid during a specific timeframe.

Improve Your SEO

Don’t you want to rank higher on search engines? Everyone wants that their social media pages and website should rank higher on search engine result pages than their competitors.

But, to achieve this you need to focus on SEO which is also called search engine optimisation. It helps in driving organic free traffic and can potentially increase sales of your products or services during the season sale.

For improving SEO, you should start a blog on your website, and keep it updated with frequent blog posts. Content Marketing is an excellent SEO tool, as well as it is beneficial in educating your customers about your products and services. But, you need to improve the technicality of the websites, website speed, and keep the content relevant to your brand.

Because SEO works well when the content is relevant.

Bring Back Old Success Marketing Campaigns

You need to look back sometimes, as everyone says, history repeats itself. List the successful seasonal marketing campaigns. Now, you need to repeat those successful seasonal marketing campaigns.

Even some big brands run the same seasonal promotions every year. It helps in building brand loyalty and drives new and old customers who want to get in on the offers. It can also excite your current followers for visiting the shop and making the purchase.

So, always try to repeat the success, by running successful campaigns.

Create Tailored Email Outreach

If we’re talking about marketing strategies and we don’t talk about the emails, then all in vain. Well, the reason behind this is, that people provide email more frequently than their mobile number, and email is a great way to nurture your leads.

As we know that we can’t convert our users into customers so easily because of their previous core beliefs system, and trust factors.

So, we can nurture our new subscribers by sending them a series of emails about offers according to the particular season.

We can also send our current email subscribers a special offer designed only for them. So, don’t leave it.

Scheduling

Well choosing the best time for starting the seasonal marketing campaign is easy. You need to watch your competitors closely and note down when they start promoting their offers on a particular season, you just need to start the promotions of special offers just before them. One thing more, don’t forget your audience because they are the ones who’ll make a purchase, not your competitors. So, schedule your seasonal marketing campaign on the best time to communicate with your users. And build your marketing material in a storytelling format and with what your users will most likely engage with.

So, schedule everything before time and your competitors keeping in mind your audience.

Execution

Execution is the most important part, well, you need to promote your offers on each platforms your business or you are active on. One of the most common characteristics of a successful business is to make the best use of Omnichannel Marketing. You should also incorporate it into your marketing campaigns. Omnichannel Marketing is all about providing your users with a uniform and seamless experience on each platform they visit with. It is a business marketing strategy that is used to provide a seamless and best user experience along with improving business growth. Team DigiAvtar have already written a blog for you on this topic, click here to know more about Omnichannel Marketing.

Well, we’ve discussed the steps of creating a seasonal marketing campaign with the help of the aforementioned steps, now let’s talk about the benefits of seasonal Marketing plans

Benefits of Launching a Seasonal Marketing Campaign

Many new and established businesses can be seen enjoying the benefits of seasonal marketing plans. With the help of seasonal transitions and holidays, they appeal to their new and existing customers with special offers. Here are some common benefits every business can enjoy from seasonal marketing strategies:

Create Immediacy & appealing to Seasonal Excitement
Drives Traffic
Increase Brand Awareness
Makes Your Brand Recognizable
Converting Potential Customers into Paying Clients
Shows Adaptiveness of the Businesses towards the Market
Boost Products Sales
Cost-Effective and Reusable
Increase visibility and Chances of Conversion

Every marketing plan has its own benefits according to its nature, as seasonal marketing has. We’ve discussed the most important benefits we can get by implementing seasonal marketing in our business.

Let’s move forward and discuss about some tips and ideas for seasonal marketing campaigns.