How to conquer Seasonal Marketing this Holiday Season

August 1, 2023 | Digital Marketing

Ho Ho Ho! How to conquer Seasonal Marketing this Holiday Season?

Winter is coming.

Holidays are upon us. Which means it’s time to loosen your purse strings and revel in the general festive mood.

After all, who wants to be left behind and miss out on the fun?

But to you as a digital marketer, holiday season represents an opportunity for growth in business due to the additional factor of seasonality, accounting to almost 20% of the annual sales

It is also worth noting that the seasonal marketin done during this period would focus more on increasing brand awareness while driving sales and revenue.

How-to-conquer-Seasonal-Marketing-this-Holiday-Season

Moreover, in this era of incessant marketing campaigns, especially digital, people are increasingly flexible in their brand loyalties.

By having an entertaining, emotive and educating campaign, you reap the benefits of increased brand awareness. If you leverage it with the power of irresistible seasonal offers and consumers will gladly turn into customers.

There are certain elements of seasonal marketing, which if implemented well, generates increased brand awareness and revenue.

Let’s look at a few actionable marketing tips for you to implement this holiday season.

Tip 1: Position your brand early in the Holiday Season to rise above the noise

40% of people will finish their holiday shopping in November.

15% more will finish their holiday shopping in the first two weeks in December.

What does it tell you?

The earlier the better.

You need to start your campaign well before the holiday season to beat the marketing noise of your competitors.

If you want to take control of over 90 percent of the search traffic and improve the website traffic performance around a given holiday, content specific to a seasonal event needs to be published at least 45 days prior.

By positioning your brand early, you can take advantage of the anticipatory nature of the consumers, gratify the elicited emotions, and reap the associated rewards in the form of buisiness revenue.

Across online and social media, it could be in the form of

  1. Promotional events/ Holiday Coupons/ Deep Discounts
  2. Contests on your website and social media/ Collaborative Giveaways

A great example of starting early is that of Oreo’s holiday campaign #Colorfilled in 2015. The company tweeted out an invitation in November to design and personalize Oreo packs for friends and family. They also included a call for action in the tweet with a message of urgency. See it for yourself.

Oreo’s-holiday-campaign

Takeaways:

  1. Position your brand early and prepare seasonal offers and content accordingly.
  2. Use both online and offline mediums to reach the maximum percentage of your demographic

However, don’t worry if you missed the bus. After all, 18% of the consumers shop last minute. The tips we are giving below, if applied, can still make up for the lost time. Ready?

Tip 2: Drizzle on a Healthy Dose of Holiday Emotions

One of the ways to really imprint on your consumers that the holiday season is upon them is by creating a special holiday theme around which your website and your social media campaign should revolve.

Having a positive theme will tap into the consumer’s need for celebrations and warmth, at this time of the year. Your reward? Mooney-eyed, cuddle-ready consumer. Go grab ’em.

A great example of such buzz creation is that of Coca Cola selling personalized Coke bottles with customer’s name on the bottles as part of their holiday themed ‘Share a Coke’ campaign, first launched in Australia in 2011.

Share-a-Coke'-campaign,

( Image source: Hubspot)

By tying the whole marketing campaign to the overall theme of happiness, the brand was able to elicit positive emotions through personalization.

The numbers speak for themselves. With around 235,000 tweets from 111,000 fans using the #ShareaCoke hashtag which in turn translated into 150 million personalised bottles sold, the campaign was a huge success and generated huge revenues for the company.

Tip 3: Virality with positive emotions – the perfect recipe for a massive buzz

Connect with your audience using well crafted holiday videos that elicit positive emotion.

Research has consistently shown that evoking the positive emotions of joy and happiness causes a product to sell much more effectively. Vivid emotional imagery in your brand representation translates to loyal customers.

Positive emotions which encourage consumers to share such content with others, tap into the season’s overall theme of sharing, leading brands to experience explosive online buzz and therefore improving search engine visibility.

A great example of positive emotion resonance is a heartwarming Christmas video eliciting the feelings of love, posted by the German supermarket Edeka.

Their Christmas focussed advertisement taps into the need of good feelings associated with familial love into a story, demonstrating how powerful it is in eliciting positive emotions through the medium of storytelling.

supermarket-Edeka

 

Christmas-focussed-advertisement

As you can see for yourself, the video was a massive success gaining 35 million views within a week of posting and rising since then.

Takeaways:

  1. Elicit positive emotion and consumers will respond in kind
  2. Channelise the power of emotions through Storytelling

Tip 4: Create Urgency Amongst Consumers

However, you don’t always have to appeal to positive emotions. Subtle provoking of fear among your consumers can help you in your marketing strategy.

Take FoMo for example.

FoMo or Fear of Missing Out is common psychological phenomenon. And thanks to the power of social media, this fear is amplified even further.

Implementing this is a simple process. By adding deadlines on your offers and deals, price discounts and shipping, you appeal to the irrational instinct in your consumer leading them to buy from you.
Coupling this with the right call to actions can work wonders for your brand. Check out this Starbucks example, similar to which are done by many advertisements.

Starbucks-example

 

Tip 5: Maintain the consistency of the campaign across different channels/ Tying it all in with the power of mass outreach

You probably had an inkling on what this tip was going to be based on the previous tips and examples.

Social media and online outreach are powerful amplifiers of the message. And when the message is positive, it snowballs into something even bigger.

Consider this statistic: 74% of consumers will turn to social media sites for holiday research.

And no, they don’t just do research. Consumers are spreading the word as well by tweeting and sharing promotional offers, deals and links to contests.

And let us not forget the power of emails.

Combining the ability of reaching out to the masses ( via online and social media outreach) and attractive holiday offers, you have a recipe for consumers scrambling to buy from you.

So how do you do that?

Use the following tips:

  1. Keep your social media handles updated with your offers, discounts and promotions.
  2. Ensure your consumers are signed up on your newsletter and utilise emails to send coupons and gift cards. According to data, 87% of all consumers use print coupons they receive in the mail.
  3. Generate brand loyalty by membership. 68% of consumers state that coupons generate loyalty while 91% of brand loyal shoppers use coupons.

Conclusion

So how to capture the Holiday traffic?

Start as early as possible.
Create a celebratory theme and center your campaign around it.
Leverage the combined power of social and online outreach with deal sweeteners in place.

And before you go, we will give you one last tip that is easy to miss out on – Learn from your past.

You can start by tracking your previous year’s data on seasonal marketing, making use of techniques that worked while improving upon it in this year’s campaign. Remember, continuous learning and improvement is the key.

So what has your experience been in seasonal marketing, so far? Any other insights that you have used successfully? Feel free to join us in a discussion.

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2 Comments

  1. Capitalising on holiday traffic is actually a great way to increase revenue in a short duration. Thanks for the tips and information.

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