Traffic to your business, whether it’s in person or online, can fluctuate throughout the year. Many fluctuations are based on seasonal changes, and that’s where seasonal marketing comes in. Seasonal marketing is the process of promoting your products or services at specific times of the year. Think themed promotions for specific holidays, events or seasons.

The most famous example of seasonal marketing is Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latte. Almost 20 years ago, Starbucks created one drink to celebrate autumn. Now, every year when the drink re-appears on their menu, there are headlines about it. They even trademarked the abbreviation PSL in 2013!

Your business doesn’t need to achieve PSL status to do seasonal marketing effectively, you just need to plan ahead so it’s not an afterthought. Planning seasonal marketing campaigns* can be as simple as asking yourself a few questions in order to prioritize and make decisions:

*A campaign is just the marketing term for a set of activities you plan and execute to promote your product or service  

Who is your audience and what do they care about?

Whether you sell directly to consumers or businesses, your audience will determine how impactful seasonal marketing will be for your business. For example, if your audience includes parents of school-aged children, “back to school season” may be an important time of year for you to market and sell a majority of your products. If you are selling a product to a corporate procurement team, “end of quarter budgeting” may be an important time for sales. Or, maybe you want to take advantage of an obscure holiday like National Mason Jar Day to promote your product and business. 

In order to plan your seasonal marketing campaigns, you want to understand your customer. Ask them what times of year are most important to them, or when they’re more likely to buy your product or services. You want to get a really good understanding of what their calendar looks like so you can stay in sync with their purchasing decisions.

You will also want to understand what they care about at these times. Are they looking for specific deals or specials, or are they more likely to purchase for a seasonal occasion like holiday gifts? Knowing this will help you understand what to prioritize. 

What should you prioritize?

Once you have established who your audience is and the seasonal moments that drive their purchasing decisions, you’ll need to prioritize. It’s tempting to try and cover every single season or holiday in an effort to do more marketing, but you’re busy and running a business, you don’t have time to do everything!

Based on what you’ve learned from your customers, prioritize the top 3-5 seasonal marketing moments you want to pursue in the next 12 months. You can prioritize based off of time (eg. how much time do you have to prepare), impact to your business (eg. is there a specific season during which you expect to generate a majority of your sales), personal preference or any other criteria you set. 

Anything that hasn’t been prioritized should be saved for later - it doesn’t mean you’re not going to act on those ideas, it just means you aren’t going to run a seasonal marketing campaign for it in the next 12 months. If circumstances change, you can always revisit your list of ideas and re-prioritize.   

What do you want to include in your seasonal marketing campaign?

With your prioritized list, you’ll want to brainstorm ideas for your seasonal marketing campaigns. These can range from running promotional discounts (the most common), to using season-specific content to bring in customers. Other ideas include custom seasonal content (eg. gift guides), seasonal games or giveaways, building a seasonal email list or adding specific seasonal options to your product (eg. gift wrapping, ability to send your product as a gift). 

With your list of ideas, you’ll want to also figure out what channels you will need to use to promote your campaign. Do you need an email? What about social media posts? Signage? Mailer advertisements? The list goes on, and you should use what’s worked for your business in the past and try to experiment, if possible. 

How successful were you?

After launching your seasonal marketing campaign, you’ll want to pay attention to how well it performs. Keep an eye on new inquiries to your business, mentions of your business and of course, sales. Once your campaign is over, you should save your metrics in order to decide whether or not the campaign was worth your time and if you should do it again next year, or if there are improvements you want to make in the future. 

Example: Handmade face masks

Before you get started, here’s a quick example of how to plan a seasonal marketing campaign. Let’s imagine you are an independent creator of handmade face masks in North America:

1. Who is your audience and what do they care about? Your audience is anyone over the age of 3 who needs a reusable face mask to wear in public. Specifically, with this campaign you are focusing on elementary school aged children, and the parents who are buying masks for them. You know that these children like variety and want to be able to express themselves with their masks by wearing different colors or patterns for various holidays and seasons. ‍
2. What should you prioritize? You have a list of upcoming holidays that your audience cares about, and know that the closest one is Halloween. You also know that in lieu of trick or treating or Halloween parties this year, children and their parents want fun masks that can either serve as a costume or compliment their costume, and that this may be a great opportunity to boost sales. You decide to prioritize Halloween over other holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, and the upcoming seasonal change from autumn to winter.  ‍
3. What do you want to include in your seasonal marketing campaign? You decide to run a promotional discount on your online store, so customers can get 20% off their orders ahead of Halloween. To kick off the discount, you decide to send a promotional email to customers. You also decide to feature a number of Halloween-themed masks and masks that match popular costumes on the front page of your online store and on your social media accounts.
4. How successful were you? Once all of your masks have been shipped out (in time to arrive before Halloween, of course), you take a look at how successful your kick off email was, how engaging your social media posts were and how many sales you generated. It turns out that plenty of parents wanted to buy more masks, and you ran a successful seasonal marketing campaign! Time to celebrate.