As January arrives, it’s time once again for marketers to begin reviewing their holiday season success. Today, marketing has evolved to the point where festive campaigns can be undertaken throughout a wide range of industries in an effective manner. But how can you build a seasonal campaign that resonates with your audience?
The winter months are populated by businesses seeking to promote special Halloween discounts, Christmas ranges, or one-off Black Friday events–but successful marketers are responsible for far more than simply adding a pumpkin to October advertising campaigns.
So if your seasonal campaigning didn’t draw in as much revenue as you hoped, here are some tips to remember for your next festive campaign. Let’s take a deeper look into how we can win and inspire new customs by embracing the holidays:
Is it worth embracing seasonal marketing?
Yes.
According to Statista data surrounding Valentine’s Day in 2013, the United States spent $244.9 million on seasonal chocolate as a result of seasonal marketing campaigns. Furthermore, the National Retail Federation found that 20% to 40% of yearly sales for small or mid-sized retailers take place during the final two months of the year–firmly highlighting the value of the holiday season.
In addition to this, the available statistics from E-Marketer indicate that US seasonal sales are expected to increase 5.7% year-over-year, reaching a value of $885.7 billion as a result of increasing competition between rival marketing campaigns.
In a nutshell, the festive season is a marketing opportunity that marketers simply cannot allow to pass them by.
Let’s take a deeper look at how you can create a campaign to draw in customers this winter:
Build your campaigns on data
Your campaigns should always be built on a data foundation. This can help to inform you about customer behavior when your busiest periods are taking place.
For instance, Google Trends can be a great tool to help gain an industry-wide indicator of audience intent. Let’s imagine that you’re a coffee shop that’s interested in releasing a seasonal-themed hot drink to attract customers throughout the cold winter months.
As Google Trends data shows, queries for ‘hot chocolate’ spike significantly and consistently each December, whilst remaining less popular as a choice in the spring and summer months. This indicates that there’s an opportunity to sell far more hot chocolate drinks through strategic festive campaigns than at any other stage in the year.
Build an effective schedule
Timing is everything when it comes to seasonal campaigns. This doesn’t simply mean creating a schedule in advance of an event, but also building a comprehensive overview of each stage of the campaign and when to set it into action.
When it comes to content creation, remember that you’re simply one of the countless companies looking to build campaigns that will reach thousands or millions of prospective customers. Editors will be inundated with pitches, and posts are best prepared and sent over to sites with a clear gap of around two months in between.
It’s also essential to keep the audience in mind. When should you contact them? At what point would they be most receptive to your messages? Could they be more willing to engage in your campaign one month prior? Or could they be prepared to buy your festive goods even earlier? Plan your schedule accordingly in line with your expectations.
Always be on the lookout for improvements and tweaks
Because festive campaigns are generally more successful when they’re original and well-thought-out, it’s only natural for marketers to get things wrong from time to time. If a campaign isn’t making the impression that you’d hoped for, it pays to have a backup on hand.
Tweaks can be easy to implement and don’t necessarily require throwing out the blueprints immediately.
Fortunately, changing things up doesn’t have to be expensive either, and if you feel as though your festive campaign website URL is failing to draw in visitors, it can be easy to check domain availability in order to find another cost-effective website name that’s better positioned to attract customers.
As we say goodbye to another holiday season, marketers around the world will be ramping up their preparations in order to create campaigns for the next that can resonate with their audience and deliver a significant boost to conversions. Just be sure to have a backup plan up your sleeve and be brave enough to make changes on the fly if things don’t get off to the perfect start.
