Why do seasonal promotions work so well?
Any good marketer will have a calendar with upcoming events marked on it, even if it only exists inside their own head. The potential benefits of seasonal marketing campaigns are just too great to ignore.
In 2018, the International Journal of Engineering Technologies and Management Research published a paper entitled Seasonal Marketing: Strategies Using The Calendar.[1]
The study’s authors wrote: “Good marketers never miss out on any chance to maximise sales and hence profits of any product. This is usually supported with a peak in sales, which is usually the peak season of these products or services… But what makes it vital is the right timing to tap [into] these seasons.”
It’s a perfect summary of why seasonal promotions are so important and why it’s equally important to get seasonal campaigns right, both in terms of their design and their timing.
What is a season?
When we talk about seasonal marketing, we’re rarely referring to spring, summer, autumn and winter. In fact, relatively few products are directly associated with the calendar seasons (e.g. barbecues, accessories and foods are more linked with good weather than with summer itself).
Instead, a ‘season’ can be any significant calendar event capable of driving an increase in sales. It can even be a collection of events, such as Christmas, Boxing Day, New Year’s and the January sales, all rolled into one campaign.
Can one-day campaigns be seasonal?
A season can be a single day, such as Black Friday, but is more often a weekend, a week or more. But ‘deal of the day’ campaigns can have impressive results.
This kind of seasonal marketing can be particularly effective for sales of pleasurable, luxury and ‘hedonic’ products, as opposed to the utilitarian staples we all need to buy anyway.
In 2015, the International Journal of Research in Marketing published a study which found that hedonic products find greater success with very time-limited promotions, such as price discounts lasting less than a week.[2]
What are the biggest seasonal opportunities?
Different brands can tap into very different seasonal opportunities, but there are some that are universally recognised, and they’re spread right throughout the year.
Some of the biggest and best seasonal opportunities for marketing campaigns include:
Calendar seasons
Although it’s less common than you might expect, some industries are tied to the calendar seasons. Examples include fashion, where catalogues normally cover spring-summer and autumn-winter of each year.
Travel agents and tour operators will typically have a ‘summer season’ too, although this often covers May-August rather than starting with the official first day of summer in late June.
Holidays and national days
Holidays and other celebrations are much bigger drivers of retail promotions. The ‘seasonal’ aisle in your local supermarket is likely to actually be dedicated to an event like Halloween, Christmas or Easter.
National days like Valentine’s Day, Father’s Day or Mother’s Day (which it’s worth noting is in March in the UK but May in the USA) can also help to generate additional sales, especially in gifts and greetings.
Trends and memes
The internet has of course completely transformed seasonal campaigns. Black Friday (and its ecommerce sibling Cyber Monday) have become a weeks-long fire sale for online retailers like Amazon (which also runs deal-of-the-day promotions in mid-July on Prime Day).[3]
Some seasonal opportunities only exist thanks to social media. ‘Movember’, when men try not to shave their moustache all month, started life as a meme. Other examples that were popularised on social networks include alcohol-free Dry January and, in the same month, meat-free Veganuary.
Missed opportunities in seasonal promotions
Seasonal promotion campaigns do not happen overnight. In general, you should be planning months in advance to make sure your campaign lands at exactly the right time.
You may need to develop marketing materials to support your campaign, get additional pages added to your website, or stock up on physical products to make sure you can ship orders on time.
Some of the biggest missed opportunities in seasonal marketing campaigns include:.
Too little, too late
As mentioned, it takes time to properly develop a campaign, the associated marketing materials and the physical fulfilment of deliveries such as gift subscription boxes.
Using Christmas as an example, online-only campaigns should be well into the planning stage in September-October. This means any artwork and other content can be commissioned, published and rank in the search results in time for the holiday season itself.
New Year, old content
By nature, seasonal opportunities come around year after year, and it can be hard to be innovative. But publishing the same ‘New Year, New You’ marketing blog post every January is unlikely to have much impact.
Work with an experienced multichannel marketing agency like MRM to explore new avenues, based on our decades of working with other brands in industries like yours.
Failure to follow-up
The end of the season doesn’t have to mean the end of your campaign. Ideally you will have collected a large amount of data about your customers and prospects.
In the weeks after your peak season ends, you can target advertising and promotions at these already-engaged individuals, improving the success rate of your marketing throughout the rest of the year.
Best practice for seasonal marketing campaigns
Let’s end by summarising the best practice for seasonal marketing campaigns. Putting together everything we’ve learned above should help you to capitalise on these often very short-term opportunities for growth, whether that’s one-off sales or lasting subscriptions.
- 1. Know your peak season: Identify one or more times of year when you think a campaign will be more effective, and make sure you don't forget about it.
- 2. Plan ahead: Speak to MRM as early as possible, so that we can spend some time planning your campaign to maximise return on investment.
- 3. Allow for fulfilment: Shipping physical goods requires logistics and, you guessed it, more planning. Don't get caught out by failing to deliver on time if your campaign is an overnight success.
- 4. Support your campaign: Develop marketing materials, SEO landing pages, social media content and vibrant graphics to help promote your campaign and highlight that it is for a limited time only.
- 5. Follow up with prospects: Make sure you gather enough information from interested customers, so that you can run follow-up campaigns after the main season and drive some extra sales at other times of year.
All of this should see your sales skyrocket when the season comes around. If you’d like to get a headstart on your rivals ahead of the next key date in your sector, speak to MRM today.