Member Article

How to Bolster Your Marketing Efforts by Introducing Seasonal Offers

As the days begin to draw shorter, another busy festive period is almost upon us. With major holidays like Christmas, Easter, Halloween, Black Friday, and many more important cultural and religious events set to take place around this time of year, many businesses are ramping up their marketing efforts. But how can you embrace the festive season to win more conversions?

Many marketers set out their seasonal preparations well in advance, but there’s no right or wrong way of preparing for the holiday season–just so long as you don’t let an opportunity to market to new audiences pass you by.

(Image: Software Advice)

As we can see from the chart above, different marketers take varied approaches in order to optimize their holiday promotions, including social media campaigns, email marketing, and more traditional flyers and posters.

What are Seasonal Promotions?

In a nutshell, a seasonal promotion refers to any form of promotional activity such as special offers, discounts, or limited edition products that are influenced by holidays, festivals, seasons–or just about any other recurring event.

These campaigns can be a great way for businesses to market their products or services in a different way. By delivering pre-planned seasonal marketing efforts, you can help to keep your customers engaged in your business all year round with refined and original promotions.

From a customer perspective, seasonal marketing can be wholly enjoyable to discover. Over the years, campaigns like Christmas adverts, Halloween-themed social media campaigns, and Black Friday offers have been embraced with more enthusiasm than traditional marketing–and is largely acknowledged connotatively as a fixture of the holiday season itself.

With this in mind, how can you seek to market your products and services in preparation for the holiday season? Let’s take a look at some essential considerations to make before launching your new festive campaigns:

1. Set Out Clear Goals

There’s little point in building a seasonal campaign if you’re not sure of your goals. Before creating marketing materials, spend some time considering what you want from your marketing campaign. Are you looking to get rid of leftover stock? Make your brand more discoverable online? Or build attendance for a themed event?

This is an often overlooked aspect of the process by businesses that are simply eager to embrace the holiday season. But creating tangible goals is the only way that you’ll be able to know that you’re on the right track.

2. Understand Your Audience

Once you’ve established your goals, it’s important to know exactly who you’re marketing to in order to achieve them. For this aspect of your festive marketing plan, it’s worth building an ideal customer profile to gain a clear image of who you expect to be on the receiving end of your campaign materials.

Factors like your preferred customer’s age, location, and interests can all be important considerations, as well as your customers’ favorite rival brands and their respective pain points Furthermore, it’s essential to understand the expectations that your customers will have for your products or services.

Through attaining a comprehensive understanding of your audience, you can automatically fine-tune your campaign to ensure that it’s well received by the right individuals.

3. Use Tools to Build a Seamless Campaign

Seasonal marketing campaigns aren’t exactly a new concept, and businesses have been creating festive special offers for many years. This means that you’ll need to stand out from the crowd with eye-catching content and marketing materials.

Platforms like Powered Template can be an extremely useful resource when it comes to finding great marketing templates that are themed around the holiday season. Within Powered Template’s extensive range of graphic design resources are a range of holiday-themed flyers, brochures, ads, and posters that cater to many different events like Halloween, Christmas, Oktoberfest, even more simply autumnal themes.

For small businesses, adopting pre-prepared templates can be a major time and money saver in crafting impactful seasonal offers.

4. Prepare for Increased Business

There is such a thing as too much of a good thing in the world of marketing, and you’ll want to be prepared for an increase in the number of sales you make. Generally speaking, a successful campaign can lead to an increase in website traffic, and higher levels of orders and sales. If your website’s prone to crashes, or your stock is low in volume, your campaign could turn customers away from your business due to bad experiences.

Be sure to look at the volume of customers that your campaign is reaching and stock appropriately for a logical boost to sales.

5. Inspiration is All Around

The beauty of seasonal offers is that they’re all around you - and have been for decades. This means that you’ll never be short of inspiration for how to cater to your designated customer profile. Look at how your competitors have marketed their services in the past, and draw ideas from more avant garde special offers and events from around the world. You won’t need to reinvent the wheel to make a splash, but evolving good existing ideas can be an excellent process.

As well as inspiration, it’s important to watch out for your competitors’ movements in the market ahead of events. One sure-fire way of inhibiting the impact of your campaign is introducing a special seasonal offer two weeks after all of your customers have bought into a rival’s offer. Seek to keep ahead of your competitors and avoid lagging behind their campaigns.

Seasonal offers can be an excellent way of delivering a useful boost to sales and brand engagement. Be sure to take the time to map out seasonal events and prepare offers surrounding them in good time - this can help you to adapt your stocks and prepare your website for fluctuations in traffic. It also provides ample time to set up social media campaigns to ensure that everyone is aware that something special is around the corner.

Once you begin to get the balance right, your business can enjoy regular seasonal performance boosts which can bring more recurring customers and revenue streams all year round.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Dmytro Spilka .