Market Year-Round with Seasonal Advertising

It’s rare that one marketing strategy will work for a business all year. The market naturally fluctuates throughout the year; your traffic will change, sales will rise and fall, and your ad campaigns may perform better or worse during certain months. Savvy business owners recognize this and create strategies to best target the highs of each season with seasonal advertising campaigns.

Why Seasonal Marketing Is Important

Seasonal advertising is more than capitalizing on holidays like Valentine’s Day, Christmas, and Mother’s or Father’s Day — it’s changing how you advertise your service or product year-round. While it may go without saying, seasonal advertisements are your best bet to capitalize on highly-searched terms before people stop being interested in them for another year. For example, most families aren’t going to want to look into buying beach towels when it’s November (depending on their location, of course). They’ll instead be interested in holiday decorations, winter coats, boots, gloves, and heavier clothes. If you shift your marketing strategy to match those wants, then you drive up your potential of generating more interest and more sales in your product or service. That’s seasonal advertising: creating a strategy that is unique to your business and works with the four different seasons.

How to Create a Successful Seasonal Marketing Campaign

The first thing you’ll want to figure out is what goal/goals you have for this campaign. In other words, what product or service do you want to advertise, when do you want those ads to be live, how much you want to spend on those campaigns, and how much you want to make. Remember to be realistic and base everything off past data and experiences. Don’t have past data? Your competition probably does. Take a look at competitors’ seasonal campaigns and dissect it. Learn what type of content they used, when they advertised specific services or products, the tone in their ads, the language they used, and if there was a discount code driving their sales. It also helps to get an early start. Don’t wait until November to start planning a winter campaign. By then, you’ve already missed early shoppers and those looking to prepare their home, life or business for the winter. Plan ahead at least 3 months so you’re confident that you can hit the right demographic when your service is needed most. Finally, seasonal advertising campaigns should be living documents, meaning that they’re not set in stone. Use these documents to update timing, frequency, what type of ads you’re running, if you’re offering a discount or deal with the ad, and the product/service you’re pushing in the campaign.

Tips to a successful campaign:

• Compile your data
• Research your competition
• Plan your campaign at least 3 months in advance
• Always include secondary and tertiary goals to avoid oversaturation Most businesses utilize seasonal advertising, so be sure to offer something your competition does not!
• Keep a living document to track everything
• Work with your advertising and design team to create the best campaign possible

Example of Seasonal Advertising

Say you’re running a hardware store that specializes in HVAC repairs and replacements, plumbing, and solar energy. You’re looking to create a new advertising strategy for the year 2021. First, compile all of your past data and find trends for the services you want to advertise. If you’re looking to promote HVAC, plumbing, and solar, stick to those data points. Find where the peak number of leads were generated, where the campaigns generated less results, and look at when your competition pushed their advertisements as well. Then, start making a rough strategy for each season. It can look like this:

Winter

• HVAC heating repairs, maintenance, and replacements to make sure you stay warm during the tail-end of winter
• Plumbing and pipes to make sure nothing is frozen and everything is ready for the upcoming spring

Spring

• Summer preparations for air conditioner maintenance, repairs, and replacements
• Push for solar panels — what a better time than summer to start capitalizing on green energy?

Summer

• Air conditioning all the way
• Secondary service: your choice!

Fall (into winter again)

• Start pushing for HVAC heating maintenance
• Push for plumbing and pipe insulation services to prevent frozen pipes

Once you have your plan in place, meet with your advertising and design departments to go over a working strategy, set dates for the campaigns, and generate ideas so you’re prepared once it’s time for your new advertisements to go live.

First Time Making a Seasonal Advertising Strategy?

It’s not easy to decide exactly what you want to be doing and marketing six months down the road. You’re going to want a seasoned veteran on your side to help you reach new customers at exactly the right time. That’s where Helix House comes in. If this is your first time trying to create a seasonal marketing campaign, give us a call. We’ll help you get on the right track, create and design top-notch ads that match both the season and your product or service, and will keep track of every ad performance for you. That’s not all: everything we do is transparent and interactive. You’ll know exactly what we’re working on and you will be included in the process to ensure we’re representing your voice and brand the way you want it to be represented. So reach out today and start capitalizing on the rest of the year.