3 Quick Ways to Create Custom Digital Marketing Campaigns That Tie in Perfectly With the Time of Year
Pumpkins are a hot item in October. Holiday décor flies off the shelves in December. Fireworks sell like flammable hot cakes in early July.
These are just a few truisms we know about seasonality. Certain products and services sell better during specific time periods due to the weather or how they tie in with a holiday or special event. Most businesses – including home services providers, manufacturers, auto dealers, and healthcare practices – have a peak sales period where seasonality works in their favor, so it behooves them to use that bit of predictability to their advantage as much as possible.
For instance, our HVAC clients get extremely busy during the winter and summer because their customer base wants to ensure they’re prepared for cold and heat. A broken HVAC unit is not something that any family wants to experience during adverse temperatures, which is where seasonal marketing comes into play. Because HVAC services are at their highest demand during peak seasons, it makes sense to begin marketing HVAC services that prepare homes for challenging weather in the spring and fall.
However, that’s just one of many examples of seasonal marketing. Keeping the advantages of seasonality in mind, we will break down some tactics to employ with your custom digital marketing campaigns during periods of peak interest. Further, we will discuss some off-season things you can do to make the most out of slow periods.
#1 – Update Your Custom Digital Marketing Campaigns to Reflect the Season
You probably already think of your customer in terms of geographic location, age, and other relevant attributes. In fact, you’re likely already using this data to target your digital campaigns. However, as the seasons change, so can your customer.
For example, athletic injuries and individuals in need of athletic training pick up during the summer because the weather is perfect for playing tennis, golf, and baseball. This means that we pivot the marketing strategy for our orthopedic physician clients to target summer athletes. The season influences behavior, which results in certain outcomes.
As a best practice, make sure that your display ads and social media campaigns speak to the season. That includes the design of your custom digital marketing campaigns as well as the messaging.
#2 – Update Your Keywords to Align with the Season and Holiday Deals
A major part of any seasonal marketing campaign is predicting what your customer wants before they want it. More specifically, you must research the search terms your customer will be using, especially if your business ties to a holiday or special event. Some examples of common seasonal search terms include:
- Summer sale
- Spring break sale
- Black Friday sale
- Cyber Monday sale
- Back to school sale
It’s also important to consider how your customer adjusts their searches based upon the season. For example, during warm weather, your customer may search the phrase “best SUVs for sale near me in Kansas City.” However, when the weather gets cold, they may change that to “best SUVs with 4WD” or “best SUV for driving in the snow.”
Need help with seasonal marketing keyword research? Check out Google Trends to get a historical look back at what people were searching for and the terms they used over the course of years. This tool removes a lot of the guesswork out of the SEO process, allowing you to finely tune your strategy to seasonal searches. Of course, access to an in-depth, comprehensive SEO tool is leaps and bounds more useful than Google Trends.
#3 – Take Advantage of the Off-Season
No business is totally consistent. Look at the data pertaining to your sales, conversions, and other relevant KPIs. It’s peaks and valleys, a rollercoaster of highs and lows your business must adjust its strategy and marketing efforts around.
We’ve discussed the tactics to employ during the busy parts of the year, but what about the lulls? Are there any advantages to being in the valley of a cyclical sales cycle?
Absolutely! Slow periods are the perfect time to handle projects you’ve been putting off and other housekeeping items. Look into the following five ideas the next time you find yourself in a down period:
- Do a website refresh.
If it’s been a few years since you’ve given your website some TLC, slow periods are ideal for auditing your existing pages and adding a fresh coat of digital paint. In addition to giving your website a fresh new look that will attract visitors, performing the audit ensures all your site’s information is up to date with no broken links or 404 errors.If you really want to impress your visitors, you can elevate the look, feel, and functionality of your online presence with a custom website. They are far more engaging and provide a better user experience, which should ultimately lead to longer session times and a lower bounce rate. If you’re searching for a company that provides custom website design in Kansas City, our team of web developers and designers is happy to help.
- Adjust your custom digital marketing campaigns to focus on SEO.Maybe your customer base isn’t ready to buy right now, but they will be in a couple months. Tailor your SEO strategy to what’s going to happen so that you have a head start on ranking for relevant keywords for seasonal marketing campaigns. If all goes well, you will have built up enough authority over the months to rank highly in the search engine results pages.
- Build up your social presence.When business is booming, you’re probably not thinking about posting perfectly filtered pics to your Insta or drafting an engaging update on Facebook. You’ve got no time to tweet or TikTok. However, during the slow periods, it may seem like you’ve got nothing but time. Invest some of it into building out your social presence or honing your social media strategy. The dividends pay off later when you ramp back up to your busy season.
- Tackle that big marketing idea.Remember that huge idea you had that either required too much time or too many resources? Maybe it’s time you boomeranged back to it. Slow periods allow for more wiggle room in your schedule to take on big marketing projects like producing an OTT video ad or creating a multi-channel drip campaign.
- Dig into the data.
The more digital marketing you do, the more data you create. That data is critical for identifying who your customer is, how they shop, what they like, what they don’t like, and how well your digital marketing tactics have performed so far. If you’re not analyzing your data, you’re unable to continually optimize your campaigns for effectiveness and maximize your return on investment.Take advantage of the slow periods by brushing up on the story the data is telling you about your business. When you know that, you’re far more equipped to make revenue projections, estimate sales cycles, and create custom digital marketing campaigns that speak to the right customer at the right time.
Need an Assist with Your Seasonal Marketing? Contact iFocus Marketing Today!
Creating brand awareness and generating leads is a full-time job. Even with all these seasonal marketing tips and tricks at your disposal, you may not have enough time or resources to invest into executing them – or the know-how to ensure they go off without a hitch.
As a provider of digital marketing services near you that’s worked on local and national marketing campaigns, our experience brings value to clients in virtually any industry. iFocus Marketing is a Swiss army knife of multi-talented marketers who deliver results, helping businesses of all sizes reach their short- and long-term goals.
See what iFocus brings to the table by requesting a free discovery call and audit. Our experts will evaluate your current website and strategy, pull some data together, and then come back with bright ideas to help you meet your business goals and give your online presence a boost.
Brandon Tietz is a senior digital copywriter at iFocus Marketing with close to a decade of marketing experience. He has written for clients in retail, real estate, automotive, education, manufacturing, healthcare, consumer goods, and several other spaces. In addition to copywriting, he has authored books, published short stories, written for several online and print publications, and was named “Best Local Writer” by The Pitch for his debut novel. He’s currently living the dream in the ‘burbs with his wonderful wife and their two dogs, Dr. Croutons and Professor Pickles.
