Seasonal marketing refers to a range of marketing techniques. Primarily, seasonal marketing means taking advantage of events or activities that can trigger customers to considering or purchasing products. Done well, it’s a great way to boost your sales and the profile of your business. However, a bad seasonal marketing campaign can really damage your reputation.
We’ve put together some helpful tips and advice on how to run a great seasonal marketing campaign. We’ve also come up with some examples of seasonal marketing campaigns you can use in autumn and winter.
Tips and advice
Choose relevant events
Be picky about the seasonal marketing events that you use. If they don’t feel naturally relevant to your business, running these campaigns could backfire. If you use campaigns that aren’t relevant, it’ll look too obviously like a marketing ploy and could hurt your company’s reputation. Choose events which fit with the products and services that you sell.
Plan ahead
It’s crucial to get the timing of a seasonal marketing campaign right. If you’re too early, your messaging won’t feel relevant to customers, and the campaign won’t be successful. If you’re too late, your customers won’t have time to take advantage of the offer when it’s needed. The amount of time needed will vary depending on the event and campaign.
It’s good to set a specific end date to your campaigns too. By doing this, you can take advantage of the scarcity marketing principle, and encourage customers to take action now.
Prepare your schedule and materials
Once you’ve chosen an event and made sure you’re planning ahead, you can then begin to prepare your marketing materials and schedule. Produce any graphics or text ahead of time, as doing things last minute could lead to an inconsistent campaign. Plan out your offers and make sure you’ve costed them properly, as you don’t want to end up losing money.
Seasonal marketing ideas
We’ve come up with some examples of seasonal marketing campaigns for the coming autumn and winter. Keep an eye out on our blog for the second half of this article where we’ll be covering spring and summer!
Autumn
- Gardening – It’s a good time to encourage customers to get their garden in order before the winter.
- Boilers – Boilers are very important heading into the winter months and customers’ heating requirements will be at the forefront of their minds. Take advantage of this by offering a special discount on boiler services.
- Halloween – Halloween can be a great opportunity to have a bit of fun with your marketing. Think about having a dress-up day. It’s usually good to treat Halloween as an opportunity to raise the profile of your business instead of selling too aggressively.
- Home security – As daylight savings time kicks in, it gets darker in the evening and customers start thinking about their home security. Consider offering a promotion on floodlights and low light security cameras.
Winter
- Double glazing – In winter, customers are worried about the quality of their home insulation. This is a good time to offer discounts on highly insulated double glazing.
- Roofing – During the winter months, any leaks or bad insulation in the roof will be very noticeable. Use this to your advantage – advertise a roofing check-up or repair service.
- Christmas – While customers may be spending their money on presents rather than home improvements during the Christmas period, it’s still worth doing some seasonal marketing. Lots of people are off work around this time, so you may find that it’s a good time for home improvement work.Seasonal marketing is a great way to add some variety to your online marketing.
Creating fun campaigns can bring your business to life and drive sales. Look out for our follow-up post with some examples for spring and summer, and tweet us @quotatispro with your ideas for seasonal marketing campaigns!