5 Ways You Can Leverage Seasonality in Your Digital Marketing Strategy
All bets are off in the fourth quarter. For many organizations, the holiday season determines whether the year was a success. It’s no secret that retail and ecommerce shopping spikes around Thanksgiving. From there, it continues to ramp up all the way through December.
With that in mind, how does your organization adapt your holiday marketing efforts to attract some of those consumers?
By leveraging the top digital marketing trends, you can get your products and services in front of the right audience, at the right time, and in a way that helps them engage with your brand. Check out the following five tips to inject some holiday cheer into your overall digital marketing strategy.
Reflect the Season in Your Marketing
Think about the main marketing and branding plays you see in December. Starbucks rolls out their signature holiday cups. Coca-Cola airs their tried-and-true polar bear ads. Spotify preps an assortment of Christmas playlists (and Mariah Carey is on a lot of them).
Basically, every brand gets into the holiday spirit. We’re not saying to add a Santa hat and twinkling lights to your logo, but there needs to be some representation of the season in your holiday marketing, even if it’s subtle.
Have you ever driven through a neighborhood where every house was decorated except for one? Don’t be that one undecorated house. Figure out a way to adopt the look and feel of the season in a way that feels natural for your brand. It can even be as simple as updating your digital ads with seasonal elements that are meaningful to your business.
Incorporate Video Marketing
Video isn’t just a seasonal digital marketing trend. It’s a year-round essential marketing tactic. According to HubSpot’s Video Marketing Playbook, videos are a must-have, not a nice-to-have. When executed correctly, video marketing will:
- Create brand awareness.
- Engage current and prospective customers.
- Drive sales and increase revenue.
- Effectively showcase new products.
- Convey valuable information to customers.
- Short videos (under 60 seconds) perform best.
- Live videos are ideal for boosting engagement.
- Vertical videos perform better than landscape-oriented videos.
- Videos that are trendy, funny, or interactive have the biggest return on investment.
Sounds pretty good, right? The trick is making time for video marketing and adhering to best practices. HubSpot’s reporting on the matter found that:
TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat remain the top video platforms. However, each platform has its own distinct audience and formatting specifics. Be sure to consider which platform is most appropriate for your brand prior to creating your holiday marketing videos.
Promote Savings However You Can
The year 2023 will long be remembered as a year of high interest rates and battling inflation. So, what does that mean for your digital marketing strategy during the holidays?
It means your customers are looking for savings, so don’t be shy about promoting discounts and limited time offers. Black Friday and Cyber Monday should play a starring role in your holiday marketing, but you should also consider other tactics that will entice bargain hunters with potential savings.
A recent survey conducted by Numerator, a consumer data company, found that 67% of respondents reported that buying items on sale is their top money-saving measure. Take that information and use it to drive your decisions. Flash sales, coupon codes, loyalty rewards, and limited time offers will be one of the biggest digital marketing trends this holiday season.
Make Email Marketing Work to Your Advantage
An effective email campaign can elevate your holiday marketing to new heights. Email marketing is inexpensive, direct, and can reach a broad audience in an instant. However, you’re in for some fierce competition. The holiday season is statistically the most active period in terms of email marketing, so you’ll need to work a little harder to stand apart from the crowd.
For email marketing campaigns, you should:
- Craft attention-grabbing subject lines. MailChimp reports the average email open rate is 21.33%, and the subject line does most of the heavy lifting.
- Make sure your email template embraces the holiday spirit. Both design and content should be on theme.
- Send time-sensitive seasonal discount emails. These create urgency among shoppers who don’t want to miss out on a deal.
- Personalize your emails as much as possible. People are more likely to open an email that addresses them by name as opposed to “valued customer.”
- Create holiday gift guides parents and grandparents can use for inspiration.
- Feel free to be creative and invent your own sales. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Small Business Saturday emails always dominate peoples’ inboxes. However, there’s no rule saying you can’t claim one of the many other days in November and December for your seasonal flash sale.
- Kick off your holiday marketing early. Although your emails sent in October might not generate much traction, you will build brand awareness in the minds of customers that pays off down the line.
Leverage Your Social Presence
Shopping habits have changed. Most consumers no longer wander aimlessly through a mall looking for the perfect gift. They’re shopping online. More specifically, they’re browsing their social media feeds.
According to Statista, the percentage of shoppers who planned to use social media to search for holiday gifts has increased year-over-year since 2016. They report that 34% of shoppers planned to use social channels to shop in 2022. Based on current digital marketing trends, we can confidently project that figure to increase in 2023.
So, what does this mean for your digital marketing strategy? It means that social media must play a significant part in it if you want to connect with your audience.
Some examples of effective social media holiday marketing include:
- Using influencer or brand ambassador marketing to promote a specific product, service, or your overall brand.
- Investing in social media ads that are targeted toward your audience and their interests. eCommerce businesses could see big returns on Meta Instant Experiences ads.
- Promoting real-time deals and discounts via Facebook Stories, Instagram Reels, and TikTok videos.
- Incorporating professionally produced images that put your product’s best foot forward.
- Creating posts that link back to your shop or online store.
- Hosting holiday giveaways and contests that generate audience engagement and positive word of mouth.
Salesforce predicts that social media advertising will drive ten times the amount of holiday shoppers compared to traditional marketing. Be sure to include social media in your overall digital marketing strategy this holiday season so you don’t get left in the dust.
Contact Us to Find Out How We Turn Digital Marketing Trends into Sales and Conversions
Q4 is a pivotal period for most organizations. Your holiday marketing efforts will likely be the difference between meeting your business goals or coming up short.
If you’ve been searching for a digital marketing agency near you with experience in embracing holiday trends, iFocus Marketing is an award-winning agency with a history of helping our clients drive sales and conversions during the hyper-competitive holiday season.
To learn how we can maximize your holiday marketing budget, request a free digital audit and consultation with us to get started. Contact us today to kick things off.
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.
