Marketing is essential to many companies in the business world. It helps you reach and connect with your target audience and grow your business in the long run. However, some industries such as ecommerce require frequent small and seasonal marketing campaigns like the back to school season.
Without marketing your business simply will not go anywhere because it won’t be seen. The basis of marketing for any business is to build brand awareness. So, seasonal changes are necessary for business success.
Reasons for seasonal marketing
There are many reasons for making changes to a marketing campaign as it can be valuable approach to marketing for your business. But these are the main three;
First, it shows that you care. This is because marketing campaigns can be tailored to seasons such as Christmas, thanksgiving and other annual events. It promotes brand loyalty and being liked by consumers. The effects of being like by consumers can spill over to other parts of your marketing such as, email open rates and referral market.
Second, it increases brand awareness. When changing marketing campaign to fit a season or an event it shows emotions. So emotionally intelligent brands will always be ahead influencing customers to feel their way into buying decisions. It drives awareness and interest from new and existing traffic because a successful seasonal campaign can invoke powerful emotions and memories.
Final, it works for all kinds of businesses especially ecommerce. There is always opportunity to take advantage of during seasons. It can be launching new products, discounts or just refreshing webpages to suit a season or an event. Usually seasonal campaigns are flexible that they can work with any budget and business size. Colours and emotions drive buying decisions, so it’s important to ensure your brand is sending the right messages.
Benefits
Aligning your products with the sentiments your customers have around that time of the year is important. You can create a call to action or your customers to pull in new traffic or convert the existing.
Seasonal campaigns create immediacy as people don’t want to miss out on an opportunity and will act immediately to prevent losing it. Which can be transfer to customers as when the season ends so does the promotion.
Making changes to your marketing campaign doesn’t have to change all the time. Seasonal campaigns can be used year on year. So, using simple and general enough language can be used annually and fits in with other campaigns.
Drawbacks
However, changing marketing campaigns every single event and seasons requires a lot of effort, time and money. This might be harder for the smaller businesses to do as they might not have enough time or money. But it can be outsourced to third parties to make it more efficient.
Seasonal marketing campaigns can be time consuming as it takes a long time to research the market and get trends. Sales and profit patterns need to be analysed, looking for possible seasonal trends. It also the effectiveness of the other seasonal marketing campaigns needs to be analysed to ensure its successful every year.
During seasons such as Christmas and Valentine’s day it can be very competitive. So, the marketing campaigns can start to repeat themselves, so it is harder to stand out and roll out products or services the fast.
Seasonal vs annual campaigns
Seasonal marketing campaigns can become costly as you will need to change the for every season to appeal to the customers. Whereas, annual campaigns can be reused year on year which does lower the cost.
However, with seasonal campaigns you can attract new traffic that you would otherwise wouldn’t which can increase sales conversions so decrease the cost.
Is it for everyone?
Seasonal marketing campaigns are a perfect fit for B2C. But it gets a little trickier to apply seasonal marketing campaigns to B2B businesses. Seasonal marketing campaigns do really fit any business the only thing is needed is to be creative and think of ways to incorporate the power of seasonality to the business.
Making seasonal changes to your marketing campaign is a worthy investment if you want to increase sales and traffic. There are drawbacks for seasonal campaigns but benefits defiantly outweigh them. So, having frequent and seasonal campaigns can defiantly help the business to grow and gain new customers that they might not have done so otherwise.