Small businesses that learn to take advantage of seasonal marketing gain significant edges over their competitors – large and small. Make sure you incorporate these things into your seasonal marketing strategies for sensational results.
Provide Plenty of Lead Time
Holidays and seasons occur at the same time each year. Create a calendar of holidays and events pertinent to your business and brainstorm promotional ideas, plans, and rollout procedures well in advance of the actual sale or event for your business.
For instance, fall and harvest go hand in hand. Tool shops or farming supply stores need to perfect their plans to roll out their fall sales events before summer arrives so they can begin making promotions and implementing sales by mid to late summer.
Create a Sense of Urgency
You may be tired of hearing about limited time offers on television auto sales and furniture store commercials, but they keep using these tactics because they work. A small house cleaning service might offer a “Spring Cleaning” special, but remind audiences that it’s important to plan their cleaning service now because the offer disappears on Memorial Day – or because available dates are filling up fast.
Reuse Successful Seasonal Campaigns of the Past
The ghosts of Christmas past sometimes bring glad news about sales campaigns that have been successful in the past. You should always seek to bring innovative changes to your business, it’s true, but when it comes to seasonal marketing, you don’t always need to reinvent the wheel. When you find something that works well, reuse it until it’s no longer working as well as you’d like or look for ways to reinvent it to make it even better.
Coordinate Seasonal Marketing Events to Holidays
A candle shop, for instance, might plan a major spring and winter event to promote candles for the holiday season in winter and to promote outdoor candles and décor heading into spring and summer.
Additionally, consider holding summer kickoff sales and specials to coincide with Memorial Day. on the 4th of July. You can kick off fall or say goodbye to summer (with deeply discounted summer inventory), with sales beginning on Labor Day as well.
Don’t forget the “little” holidays too. You know, the holidays that only get government workers off for the day. They are great times to add sneaky little sales and promotions.
The key with seasonal marketing is to be consistent with your marketing efforts, year after year.
You may want to change things up a bit, but you consistently want to market according to the seasons in order to create that expectation and get repeat business related to these seasonal sales.
