All brands recognize that consumers have a different mindset at different times of the year. As the summer holidays approach, with lockdown measures being eased further in many parts of the world, you need to change your strategy to remain competitive, while adapting your message so that it speaks directly to your ideal customers.
No matter what products or services you offer, all businesses can benefit from seasonal marketing, or holiday marketing, which means understanding these trends in advance.
The idea of a successful seasonal marketing campaign requires a vision that goes beyond sales. It requires being aligned with the consumer’s perception when the time comes. To plan your holiday marketing ecommerce strategy in the best way possible, here are 7 steps to follow.
- Collect and Use as much Data as Possible
Analytics and big data are what drives digital marketing decisions, which make data essential in your digital market strategy.
With more data, you will be able to get a better understanding of your market, pick the correct channels to reach your audience, target the right keywords, as well as optimize your campaigns.
- Define the Challenges you Need to Overcome
In today’s ever-changing marketing tactics, it is common for marketers to face challenges. The most important thing is to know which one to solve first to improve your results. Some could have trouble converting leads into customers, attracting the right traffic to their site, or knowing which data to focus on, while others could find it difficult to keep to their marketing budget.
As knowledge is everything, understanding the challenges you’re facing will help you find the right solutions to overcome them.
- Determine What You Want to Achieve
Setting marketing objectives will help you follow the right direction to meet your business goals. Some of the most important marketing objectives include building stronger brand awareness, enhancing digital presence, growing market share, promoting new products, increasing sales, targeting new customers, entering new markets, strengthening customer relationships, and developing brand loyalty, among others.
To give you a clear roadmap on how to reach your goals, the best way is to set your objectives by using the S.M.A.R.T. method – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely.
- Build your Offer
Holidays are a great time to attract new customers and reward loyal ones through a unique and personalized offer. To create an offer that makes sense for your brand and your customers, think about value added benefits that can help you stand out and build your brand loyalty.While you will have to compete on price and offer discounts, try to create a truly compelling holiday shopping experience to make your customers feel special.
- Set your Holiday Marketing Budget
As you’re hoping to take advantage of the holiday mood to drive your sales, you should first know how much you can spend on your holiday marketing strategy. To avoid surprise marketing expenses, you really need to think everything through and anticipate as much as you can.
You need to anticipate the cost of all your campaigns to have the necessary budget and best advertise your promotions. Think about your objectives, map out a timeline, and analyze past campaign successes to determine how much you should (and can) allocate to each type of advertising.
- Plan your Holiday Campaigns before the Actual Holiday
While too many companies focus on what’s in front of them right now, they forget about holidays and postpone working on their holiday marketing strategies. Planning is everything at this stage and will ensure a better chance of success in these busier times of the year.
Use the holiday spirit to set your campaigns early by creating content that reflects the holidays. Don’t forget to appeal to your customers emotions to build and plan a strong, relevant, and attractive seasonal marketing campaign. Most importantly, put yourself in the shoes of your customers: walk through the customer journey to be sure everything is frictionless
- Launch your Campaigns at the Right Time
Timing is everything, right? So, it’s essential to find the right time to launch your holiday marketing campaigns and do it through the right marketing channels to have the best impact. Don’t forget for example to optimize content for mobile, as mobile beats desktop in traffic, especially in the search phase.
If you’ve planned well ahead, you can consider automating everything with content management platforms. You can also leverage ad automation with hands-on campaign management tools.
Final Word
Each year is punctuated by events you can use to boost your revenues. Depending on your activity, certain months or celebrations of the year offer unique opportunities to accentuate your digital campaigns and reach your goals.
As seasonal marketing reaches everyone at different scales and intensities, it forces businesses to adapt quickly to design products and services that follow the era of time and seasons to stay in the game. What will be your move?
