Seasonal marketing is the promotion of products or services at specific times of the year—from Christmas and Halloween to simply the back-to-school season. Seasonal marketing campaigns allow businesses to increase the effectiveness of their advertising strategy and can significantly contribute to raising brand awareness and attracting new customers.
Incorporating seasonal content into your marketing strategy can benefit both your customers and your business. In this article, we will highlight these advantages to help you gain a better understanding of seasonal marketing.
What Is Seasonal Marketing & Why Is It Useful?
Seasonal marketing represents any promotional campaign that companies create for specific times of the year—such as the winter holidays, Halloween, or Valentine’s Day—when traffic is particularly high for businesses, and new marketing approaches are needed to appeal to customers.
Seasonal marketing campaigns are usually short-term and are meant to address customers’ seasonal needs throughout specific periods. By meeting their needs, seasonal campaigns create excitement among customers, which can encourage action. This type of marketing is beneficial to companies because it allows them to reach new audiences, engage existing customers, raise brand awareness, increase sales, and display information about products, services, or offers.
Key Benefits Of Incorporating Seasonal Campaigns Into Your Marketing Strategy
Seasonal marketing campaigns can benefit both new and established businesses in several ways. Special occasions are typically great opportunities to target new and potential customers with unique promotions that can lead to higher sales and increased brand awareness. Let’s take a closer look at the key benefits of incorporating seasonal advertising into your marketing strategy.
Consumer Engagement
Consumer expectations for noteworthy, engaging content are rising, and brands must meet them halfway in order to stay relevant. Seasonal marketing campaigns provide a great opportunity for existing and potential customers to engage with your brand. This type of content can be used on websites, e-shops, and social media platforms to grow awareness of products, services, and upcoming events or sales.
As consumer engagement becomes increasingly important for business growth, social media channels are one of the easiest ways to reach target audiences and increase your brand’s visibility. In fact, creating seasonal campaigns for social media is crucial, as most platforms tend to favor accounts with fresh and relevant content for users.
Link Opportunities
Seasonal content is only relevant during a specific period of the year, as opposed to evergreen content, which is continuous and relevant regardless of seasonal events. However, like most marketing and advertising campaigns, seasonal content is a great opportunity to build links to your company’s online platforms.
Link building is a great way to grow your audience and even extend the life of your seasonal campaign for longer periods. This is especially true if you craft it far in advance to reach out to writers who might want to share it with their readers or influencers who would share it with their followers. The topics you choose will depend on your industry, but with a little imagination, you can use this strategy regardless of the products or services you offer. Even if you don’t include your own products in the content, the links you could get are worth the effort, not to mention the additional visitors who might end up becoming customers.
Seasonal Excitement
Although the current inflationary environment inevitably diminishes purchasing power, many consumers plan to prioritize holiday gifts and celebrations, even if it means cutting back in other areas or shopping earlier, according to the National Retail Foundation (NRF).
The holiday season creates enthusiasm among customers—certain events, weather changes, family gatherings, and the desire to exchange gifts or find bargains all contribute to what is referred to as “seasonal excitement.” With a great marketing campaign, you can capitalize on this excitement by offering seasonal deals only available during this time of year. These limited-time offers can increase a customer’s likelihood of making a purchase.
Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is a marketing term that indicates how familiar your target audience is with your brand. Ideally, consumers’ awareness of your business should be associated with a positive perception of the attributes that distinguish your products and services from those of your competitors. Increasing brand awareness can do wonders for your company, as it helps anchor your products or services into consumers’ lifestyles and buying habits.
Seasonal marketing campaigns can play an important role in increasing brand awareness by drawing attention to your brand and attracting new customers with engaging content and unique promotions.
Conversions
Ultimately, seasonal campaigns can increase conversion rates because leads who know about your business but have yet to make a purchase decision would be interested in doing so during seasonal promotions.
Customers appreciate the opportunity to save money while receiving valuable products, which can increase demand and referrals. In fact, many businesses see a significant increase in customers during the holiday season, thanks to special promotions and exclusive offers. This is especially true in the current global economic state, with 58% of holiday shoppers saying that sales and promotions are more significant to them when buying gifts and other holiday items this year than last year.
Seasonal content helps by showing potential customers the benefits of making a purchase and encouraging them to remain customers after the holidays or seasonal promotions are over.
The Bottom Line
Finding relevant and interesting topics for marketing campaigns can sometimes be challenging. When you incorporate seasonal content into your strategy, new opportunities arise, and it becomes much easier to fill your company’s advertising calendar. Seasonal marketing campaigns also allow businesses to target existing customers and reach new ones, increase brand awareness, and boost sales.
