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Spring, summer, fall and winter are more than just seasons – they're opportunities for businesses to thrive.
As the seasons change and different holidays, events and activities emerge, businesses gain new opportunities to cater to consumer needs and behaviors. By paying close attention to seasonal changes, businesses can generate more sales leads and increase profits.
Every season holds opportunities, but the most beneficial season will depend on your unique business. Still, creative marketers can use every season’s characteristics to facilitate new sales. We’ll explore seasonal marketing ideas to inspire your marketing strategy and help you capitalize on every holiday, event and emotion each season brings.
Seasonal marketing is the practice of adapting your usual marketing plan to the current time of year. For example, you might change the following marketing aspects to correspond to or complement a specific season:
You can also change your sales process to highlight promotions around approaching seasonal events. For example, you could hold a back-to-school sale in the summer, a swimwear sale in the spring, a winter coat sale in the fall or a barbecue sale before Memorial Day.
Consider the following seasonal opportunities to connect with your target audience. Use this list to inspire ideas for occasions especially relevant to your business.
Many people view springtime as a fresh start — and so should marketers. Spring is an excellent time to relinquish old, ineffective tactics and introduce new and innovative offline and digital marketing strategies. This time of year brings ample holidays and events for testing seasonal marketing ideas.
Spring holidays:
Spring events and themes:
Consider the following spring-related strategies or use them as inspiration for your own ideas:
While it doesn’t have as many holidays as spring, summer presents numerous marketing opportunities and themes, including sunshine, beaches and outdoor activities. Children are usually out of school on summer vacation and families may go on trips. Brands can also highlight products and services that help people escape the heat.
Outdoor marketing is another opportunity, as many people will participate in outdoor events. If you have a physical location, utilize its front area. Advertise sales with fun chalk designs on the sidewalk or set up a tent outside to display your products or services to passersby.
When possible, take advantage of fun national days, like National S’mores Day. Whether you sell products that can help make this summery treat better or just want to connect with your audience, you’re on the right track.
Summer holidays:
Summer events and themes:
Consider the following summer-related strategies or use them as inspiration for your own ideas:
While fall isn’t exactly the start of the new year, people tend to treat it that way. Summer ends, a new school year begins and the holiday season is on the horizon. Use fall themes and holidays in your marketing strategy while considering weather shifts, changing leaf colors and traditional fall activities.
Fall holidays:
Fall events and themes:
Consider the following fall-related strategies or use them as inspiration for your own ideas:
We’re all familiar with the heavy marketing that comes with the holiday season. However, choosing a unique holiday marketing strategy will help your business stand out. Use winter’s holidays, events and themes to create a new marketing twist while honoring the holidays your audience celebrates.
Winter holidays:
Winter events and themes:
Consider the following winter-related strategies or use them as inspiration for your own ideas:
Use the following tips to ensure you maximize each season’s marketing potential.
Study a calendar well ahead of time to determine the holidays and seasons you’d like to focus on. Your industry, business, products and services will drive this decision. Here are a few examples:
The more important the season is to your annual sales, the sooner you should begin your marketing efforts. For example, many retail businesses make three-quarters or more of their revenue in the winter, so they must start seasonal marketing in early October.
Create a marketing calendar and note when each seasonal event should start. Allocate your marketing budget accordingly.
Sales and promotions are crucial during heavy shopping times, such as back-to-school and winter gift-giving seasons. During these intense periods, people often spend significant money in a short time and they look for sales and promotional extras to help them get the best value. Your business and its busy shopping seasons will drive your promotions, but here are some general examples:
For back-to-school season, a business could offer:
For Black Friday, a business could offer:
Plan each season’s unique customer offers, taking care to balance the lower profit margin with your expected increase in sales volume so you come out ahead. Planning sales and promotions well in advance is crucial, as it allows you time to buy extra items, create samples, produce promotional materials and more.
It’s time to get specific about your creative seasonal marketing ideas. Meet with your in-house marketing team or digital marketing agency to develop ideas for seasonal marketing campaigns. Discuss the following:
Brainstorm various marketing campaign types, including email marketing campaigns, offline or digital contests and games, advertising, in-store promotions and events. The goal is to obtain maximum reach, so your target market is repeatedly exposed to your marketing messages.
Once you have campaign ideas, have your team work on the creative for various media types, such as website, social, print, signage and email. As you get closer to a specific holiday season, A/B test your campaigns to optimize your results.
Your seasonal marketing efforts are designed to generate customer demand, so running out of products is the last thing you want to do. Run point-of-sale (POS) reports to evaluate historical sales for specific seasons or look to your inventory management software for this information. Adjust product inventory based on your assessment of increased or decreased demand. Consider new products and vendors to keep your inventory fresh.
If you have a physical location, putting up seasonal decorations can help put customers in a festive mood and remind them of specific needs an upcoming holiday requires. For example, Fourth of July decorations may remind them it’s time to buy food for their annual picnic or party, while winter weather decorations may prompt them to look for gifts or warm clothes. Ensure you prepare signage informing customers of seasonal sales, promotions or events.
The same goes for your digital properties. Include seasonal graphics and copy on your website, landing pages and social media accounts.
During gift-giving holidays, many customers are unsure about what presents to buy for their friends, family and acquaintances. Make it easy for them by creating gift guides featuring specific products that appeal to individuals with various interests, such as gifts for music lovers, readers, gardeners and nature lovers. Post your gift guide on your website and social accounts and mail it to your customers.
You can also categorize products by gift-giving type on your website or in your physical store to make it easy for customers who are already browsing.
Some holidays, such as Christmas, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, involve gift wrapping. Graduations, St. Patrick’s Day, Valentine’s Day and other holidays can also generate fun wrapping and packaging ideas.
Offer customers the extra convenience and presentation dazzle of wrapped gifts. Gift wrapping will endear you to your customers while giving you a competitive edge. If you run a physical store, set up a side table for wrapping to ensure speedy checkout. If you can’t spare staff for gift wrapping, consider hosting a nonprofit group that will wrap gifts for a small donation as a fundraiser for their organization. This will generate goodwill in the community.
If you sell online, you can also offer gift wrapping as an option so that items are delivered already wrapped. Giving customers the option to include a gift card is also a good idea. You can offer these add-ons for free or at a nominal charge.
Prepare your store for seasonal increased traffic and sales by doing the following:
For e-commerce sites, ensure your website has sufficient bandwidth to handle increased traffic. Your information technology department should also ensure that your checkout and payment processes are friction-free.
During and after the season, gather customer feedback to assess your efforts and see where you need improvement. Soliciting user-generated content is an excellent way to showcase your seasonal marketing successes. Ask customers to send photos or videos of them (or their gift recipients) using your products. You can also ask them for product reviews and testimonials (video testimonials are particularly compelling). Use all positive content in your marketing campaign for next year’s season and use any constructive criticism to improve your efforts.
Seasonal marketing is an opportunity to create connections with customers and increase sales. Here are some additional benefits of seasonal marketing:
When the holidays approach or the season changes, people get excited. They may look forward to gatherings with family and friends, giving and receiving gifts, eating special foods, enjoying warmer or cooler weather and getting days off from work.
Consumers have also come to expect sales and deals associated with nearly every significant holiday, so they may be excited to save money on things they want or need. Holiday marketing strategies will appeal to happy and excited customers, making them more likely to buy from you.
Seasonal marketing puts your business in front of potential customers, boosting online brand awareness and giving prospects a reason to try you for the first time. An attractive seasonal promotion can also help establish a new business’s customer base.
All businesses can benefit from extra visibility when customers are primed to buy and an outstanding promotion at this time can increase referrals and help you grow your business.
Increasing sales is the end game of all marketing and when done correctly, seasonal promotions and marketing have a direct and positive impact on sales revenue. People love deals, events and seasonal in-store decorations and will want to spend more money with you.
Customers’ needs change with the seasons. When it’s cold, they need warm clothes. When they have the day off, they may get together with friends and family for a festive meal. When gift-giving holidays approach, they’ll search for good prices.
Even if you’ve built customer personas around your target audience, consider seasonal changes to adjust your marketing and customer profiles to match current needs.
Seasonal marketing strategies can strengthen your company’s reputation as a responsive business. The possibilities are endless: Create season-related content (such as Instagram posts, blogs and infographics), design product packaging to mirror the time of year, host themed contests or add promotional discounts to relevant products and services.
Preparation is crucial in a seasonal marketing plan. Mark your calendars, plan your strategies and pay attention to the time-sensitive nature of seasonal marketing. Starting too early can derail your campaign, but starting too late can reduce its effectiveness.
Holidays and seasonal events are excellent opportunities to form genuine connections beyond products and services and to create loyal customers throughout the year.
Lyndi Catania contributed to this article.