Seasonal campaigns are a staple in any business’s marketing strategy, but it can be hard to plan for them. The latter half of the year is often considered the biggest spending season, and some of these campaigns can make or break business. Starting to plan your holiday marketing as early as possible is crucial to running a successful seasonal marketing campaign. Let’s look at how you can plan your seasonal campaign.
Define Your Audience
Who is going to buy your product or order your service? If you’re not sure, look at your current customer base – what are their age ranges, gender, and what interests do they have? If you have multiple social media channels, what are the demographics of your audience there? Do your demographics alter between platforms? Do they match your customer demographics? Once you have perfected your audience, it’s time to create a campaign that resonates with them.
Do you want your campaign to be an omnichannel experience where your communications are the same whether they’re seen on a digital platform (social media and website) or in store? Or do you want to tailor your campaign to individual platforms? The latter, while being more targeted, can be more time-consuming and costly.
Review previous campaigns
If you’ve run a seasonal campaign previously, then hopefully you found time to evaluate it. If not, now is the time to evaluate how your audience viewed your campaign and if you saw increased profits. Assess what worked well and what didn’t. By identifying your strengths and weaknesses from previous campaigns, you know what will work best.
Identify KPIs and set yourself goals
Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) provide a way for your business to gauge its progress and provide insights that allow for better business decisions. KPIs can be run at a whole business level right down to teams and even individuals. Some KPIs that you may want to focus on could include:
- Social Media – increased followers, more conversations online
- SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) – organic traffic increases, more sales, lower abandoned baskets
- Sales – Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) You need to think of what you are going to want your campaign to achieve. If you want to achieve more sales, your goal needs to reflect that.
How to Plan Your Campaign
Planning allows you to allocate time, expertise, experience, and cost to the campaign. Creating excellent marketing campaigns to help your business grow can take some time and effort and you want to ensure your campaign resonates with your audience. Striking imagery and well-designed graphics are necessary. If you’re not comfortable with design, you could hire a professional graphic designer to work their magic on your landing page, social media posts etc, or even use a free tool such as Canva to help you design your imagery.
Create a themed landing page
A landing page on your website dedicated to the campaign is necessary. This webpage needs to include some CTA’s (call-to-action). Do you want people to download a brochure? Shop now? Call you? Make sure your CTA is large enough and has some space around it, so the viewer’s eyes are drawn to it. Ensure your site is optimised and set up with UTM’s so you can track where your traffic is coming from.
Manage your social media
Take the time to schedule your social media posts in advance to allow you to concentrate on other tasks during the busy period. However, you still need to be active on social media, responding to customer requests, issues, complaints etc. A terrific way to build your following could be to run a prize draw on social media with a like-share-comment giveaway before or as you launch your campaign to boost your engagement and sales.
Run a video campaign
Did you know that video is 27 times more likely to be clicked on than images? Gone are the days when customers expect brands to produce high-end videos, sometimes the best videos are those which are authentic. You could include your staff checking out the new stock in fancy dress outfits, or even have them talk a bit about the product! While creating your own videos can be fun, the creating and editing process can be time-consuming. Consider some UGC (user-generated content). It requires little effort on your part (apart from asking the makers’ permission to share it) and is seen as truly authentic by people on social media.
Work with influencers
Do you know any influencers that may be interested in working with your business? These influencers do not need to have millions of followers, a small number is fine if their following matches your audience or target audience.
Reward customer loyalty
Reward your existing customers with a discount or even an early bird discount code.
A dedicated hashtag
Why not use a dedicated hashtag for your campaign? Your hashtag needs to be memorable (so people know what to search for and what to tag with). You could go for something as simple as #YourShopHalloween or #YourBusinessChristmas. Make sure you are using hashtags relevant to your offering as well as seasonal ones.
Campaign ideas for Black Friday and Cyber Monday
It’s a clever idea to plan Black Friday and Cyber Monday activities into your Christmas marketing plan. You want to start teasing your offerings in early November, about a week before your plan to launch your Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals. You can offer a basic discount such as 10% off a particular range, or you could use this event to get rid of old stock with a special deal.
Again, in the run-up to both Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you need to be communicating with your audience as well as making sure all stock that will be in the offer is ready to go. If you are selling a physical product, and you have a surplus, these can be added to your New Year sale.
Post-event, if you have a website, you will want to assess where your traffic came from. If you accept returns, you may want to wait until after your return period before measuring sales. You can measure year-on-year sales against the same period last year to see if you have achieved better this year.
Campaign ideas for Christmas
Christmas is big business, making up almost 25% of all annual retail sales, and other industries such as hospitality also report huge increases in profits. To ensure you get the most out of the Christmas season, businesses need to plan effectively.
We know Christmas is a time for family, friends, and traditions. Marketers and advertisers use all these in their marketing communications. If you want to get people to resonate and feel the spirit of Christmas, then you need to appeal to their senses:
Get nostalgic – remind people of great times gone by.
Traditions – like nostalgia, have a campaign around great Christmas traditions.
Emotive campaigns – really pull on those hearty strings and get emotional.
We’re here to help!
Do you need help with your Seasonal Marketing campaigns? Contact us today to chat to our team of marketing experts.
Jayde Nguyen