How Seasonal Marketing Can Improve Your Brand Image

Despite its benefits, some business owners either don’t know it or would rather find another use for their ITIN loans than apply seasonal marketing for increased sales. Not to worry, this article introduces what exactly seasonal marketing is, the different ways it impacts your brand/business, and some tools and strategies business owners can use before and during these seasons.

What Is Seasonal Marketing?

Seasonal marketing refers to marketing carried out during certain times, such as during seasonal transitions or the holidays. It could be in Easter, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentine’s, or Winter, but it doesn’t need to coincide with an official event. Understanding seasonality, however, is the key to successful seasonal marketing. It plays a crucial role in business and is the cause of sudden decreases or increases in sales that some business owners find hard to explain.

Ways Seasonal Marketing Impacts Your Brand

Seasonal marketing is often a significant oversight for many e-commerce brands, small businesses, and direct-to-consumer setups. For instance, most of them would rather not spend their ITIN loans on marketing, especially in seasons they hope to be accumulating. But the truth is seasonal marketing is inevitable because of how it impacts brands. Here are some of the ways seasonal marketing affects your brand:

#1. Seasonal Marketing Increases Brand Awareness

The first thing you learn about modern advertising is that it is all about emotions. This means that emotionally intelligent brands will always have the advantage as they actively try to influence customers to make buying decisions based on their feelings and emotions. Season-relevant and engaging content shows that a business is flexible and creative enough to get the awareness and interest of its target audience.

An effective seasonal marketing campaign focuses on nostalgia to bring up strong memories and emotions about past holidays and seasons. Meanwhile, this is also the perfect avenue to enhance brand awareness, making your customers know that you’re up-to-date with the seasons and what’s in vogue.

#2. Bigger Cash Flow For Your Brand

Every business needs cash flow to survive and improve its brand’s image. Seasonality or seasonal changes in consumer demand are factors that can positively or negatively impact a brand’s cash flow, working capital, or liquidity. It forces businesses to become conservative and a little more cautious when planning their budget for the coming fiscal year or applying for more ITIN loans. However, it does have its perks, as your business and brand will make lots of money in specific seasons if you have basic knowledge of seasonal marketing.

#3. Labor and Staffing

Seasonality always brings a flurry of business activities, while seasonal marketing prepares businesses for a busy season. Staff levels could be affected by such sudden changes, causing the increased demand for temporary labor or short-term staff. Companies and organizations that understand seasonality use the off-seasons to retrain their staff, incorporate new skills, or hire new employees in anticipation of the coming peak holiday season.

#4. Supply Chain

When done right, seasonal marketing can positively impact your supply chain and how prompt they respond. This is because vendors/suppliers also go through their seasonal changes in production. And if you run out of raw materials or supplies in peak season, sales figures could take a serious hit, and your brand could be affected. However, with proper supply chain management and purchasing strategies, you will come across as a trustworthy brand in the eyes of new and existing clients.

Seasonal Marketing Strategies To Improve And Boost Your Brand Image

Business owners who do not understand seasonality as a natural cycle in their industry might find themselves mislabelling a sales decline that lasts more than a couple of months. However, with a basic understanding of seasonality and seasonal marketing strategies in an industry, they shouldn’t have to make drastic and costly changes they will regret. These are some seasonal marketing strategies to improve and boost your brand image:

#1. Qualitative Learning

Qualitative learning helps buyers better understand the factors that move them to buy items in certain seasons or holidays. Business owners sometimes use qualitative education to communicate with their customers who patronize them in the peak season and those who did in the off-season. These customer responses should help form fresh ideas.

#2. Build A Relevant Email List

While building an email list all year round is important, doing so in certain seasons can be the winning seasonal marketing strategy to boost your brand. You can capitalize on increased traffic during these specific seasons by tagging and segmenting new signups by seasonal interest. So, whatever incentive, content, or offers you use should be relevant to the peak season.

#3. Season-Specific Testimonials

With season-specific testimonials, you get a strategy to boost your brand’s image and drive sales because customer testimonials always drive sales. Customers and clients typically rely on themselves for product recommendations and quality assurance. For this reason, it is essential to include season-specific testimonials on your product pages, content, and ads so visitors with similar needs will see them.

#4. Retargeting

Retargeting can prove effective for your seasonal marketing campaign when deployed on time. Businesses who record high conversion rates and generate a loyal customer list in a peak seasonal plan can choose to focus on and target these customers in the off-seasons leading to the next peak season.

#5. Tailor Content With Season-specific Messages

Understand that customers make purchases on seasonal holidays based on their idea of the perfect gift. That being said, there are phrases you can add to your campaign content to reel seasonal shoppers effectively. The 'Christmas Special' or 'Valentine's Special' are good examples because they show a sense of urgency and help customers make a seemingly tough purchasing decision.

#6. Launch Your Seasonal Marketing Campaign Before The Season

The timing of the launch of your seasonal marketing campaign plays a huge role in its success and may well be a rewarding strategy in your arsenal. A successful seasonal marketing campaign requires a lot of time to plan keyword research while compiling things like email lists. For this reason, it is best to launch your seasonal marketing campaign earlier, at least to gain more exposure or get Google’s approval beforehand.

#7. Social Media Engagement

Another strategy businesses can use is leveraging their social media marketing before launching their seasonal marketing campaign. It helps if they create social media posts year-round to build interest in their products. Quality promotional videos and engaging with your customer base will do your marketing goals and brand image a world of good.

7 Great Tools To Developing A Correct Seasonal Marketing Campaign

If there’s one list you don’t want to be caught on, it's the list of business owners who make the error of overlooking seasonal marketing, especially during your industry’s peak season. Not to worry, we’ve compiled a list of great tools to help you develop a correct seasonal marketing campaign.

• Mailchimp: When it comes to email marketing, Mailchimps is one of the top names to consider. It helps millions of businesses send at least a billion emails daily, with many added features and different packages.
• HubSpot: Hubspot combines email, marketing automation, and several tools with a customer relationship management system. It makes managing digital customer-facing systems stressless.
• Canva: Canva is a unique graphic design tool that you can use to create attractive collages, graphics, newsletters, logos, and more. It is easy to use and has templates that can be season-specific.
• Stencil: Stencil is another helpful graphic design tool bloggers, social media marketers, and business owners love to use. It allows users to create tons of social media graphics, blog headers, alluring ads, and more.
• Buffer: You need to download and install Buffer if you need an app to help you manage your social networks. Users can schedule posts on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter. It makes social media management fun and exciting while helping you analyze your progress/results.
• Hootsuite: Hootsuite allows you to see what you post on business social media accounts and when you post it. You can also track how your posts perform after you post them while using the platform to delegate tasks to other Hootsuite users.
• Facebook Ads: Facebook is one of the biggest social media networks, and their ad tool should be on your list for your seasonal marketing campaign. With Facebook ads, you can reach a broad audience. What's more, there are over ten different kinds of ads you can select from, including image ads, carousel ads, and video ads.

Conclusion

Businesses and companies can reach new audiences, display promotion product information, and increase sales with the help of marketing campaigns. What’s more, as a business owner, you also get to know the ways seasonal marketing impacts your brand and plan strategies beforehand. And suppose you need a budget to run a proper seasonal marketing campaign, like hundreds of businesses out there. In that case, you have easily accessible funding like ITIN loans to steer you in the right direction!

Image: charlesdeluvio