Insights From Our Experts

You’ve heard it a million times before: the early bird gets the worm. Well, the early bird (that’s your brand, hopefully) also tends to enjoy more successful busy seasons by planning its digital marketing campaigns well in advance. But when are your brand’s busy seasons? Would you benefit from a strategic marketing plan that matches your business calendar and follows the unique rhythm of ups and downs you experience on a yearly basis?

Liger encourages you to look past the holiday season and consider how your business performs and advertises over the course of a full calendar year. True, holiday marketing campaigns tend to produce solid results for many companies, but you’re not just any company. You’re YOU, and when you tailor your marketing efforts around the trends and traffic you know best, you can expect to thrive.

Let’s make a pact to plan ahead. In this article, we’ll help you develop seasonal marketing plans for the most important times of the year so you’re prepared to create stunning, high-performing assets that arrive right on time.  

Seasonal Marketing, Simplified 

Seasons change, and so should your marketing strategy. Whether you’re developing holiday marketing campaigns or more general campaigns that span the other months of the year, Liger recommends looking ahead. 

Why? For starters, you can budget your time and your money a whole lot smarter. Time is valuable during busy seasons, and when the majority of your campaign is already built and ready to launch, you can spend those precious minutes, hours, and days handling seasonal marketing hiccups and responding to customers. Speaking of busy, how common is it for last-minute tasks, rush jobs, and other frantic activity to flood your marketing team during more active sales periods? Avoiding the chaos – and avoiding burnout – can be solved with a little early planning. 

As you navigate the planning stages of your campaigns, you have time to run tests, tweaking and perfecting your messaging for every stage of the purchase journey. You’re also securing the future of your digital marketing campaigns and creating channels for ongoing engagement, keeping eyes and clicks on your brand even when business is experiencing an anticipated lull. This puts you in a position to accelerate sales as customers have you in mind all year long and will be primed to make a purchase. 

Here are some more specific recommendations: 

Check Your Calendar

Okay, maybe it’s not as simple as checking your calendar, but pinpointing your busy season(s) is the first step in making those surges in activity count. Historical data, customer behavior, and industry trends can help you create a comprehensive portrait of what the year usually looks like for your business, giving you the power to set goals, target new and established audiences, and ensure that you have a strategic marketing plan in place to drive sales, conversions, and sustainable growth. 

Understanding your annual patterns is really the first step in creating your calendar and setting yourself up for year after year of planning and executing seasonal marketing tactics with real results.  

Give Your Website a Makeover 

Is your website user friendly? If not, you’ve got some work to do. A cluttered, crowded webpage can drop conversion rates by 95% (yikes), and it only takes users 0.5 seconds to form an opinion about your website’s design, significantly influencing where your brand stands in the potential purchase journey. 

The ideal website experience should support your digital marketing campaigns by generating leads in as few clicks as possible. This means simple, streamlined navigation, clear messaging and CTAs, as well as landing pages and contact forms that align with the digital ads and touchpoints that are directing customers to your site. You can also revamp the look and feel of your online presence, ensuring brand consistency and an obvious agenda: busy season success with a focus on delivering consistent, exceptional customer experiences. Plan ahead and plan early to create digital advertising momentum. 

Create Proactively

A lot of your planning will take place during your slow seasons, and with so much more time on your hands, you have an excellent opportunity to develop a library of useful content such as blogs and videos, and the ability to ask critical questions about your customers. What issues are they facing? How can you help? What topics really resonate with them right now? The goal is for your customers to find the answers and resources they need from you, cutting their search short and highlighting your brand as both a thought leader and a reliable service or product provider within your industry.   

Keep the Lights On

Content should be continuously flowing! A truly strategic marketing plan requires year-round decisions and ads that run not only during your busy season, but before and after, too. You wouldn’t want your loyal customers to forget about you and, as we’ve mentioned, when your busy season does roll around, customers who already have your brand in mind will likely be the first ones to make a purchase. Plus, you can use continuous advertising as a source of ongoing education about your business. What’s new? What’s better? What should your customers know to make informed purchase decisions? Only you can provide the answers via planning your ads early and checking in constantly.  

Make Social Media Count 

It’s never too early to plot out your social media calendar. Social media moves at the speed of culture, and when your social media presence is always on, you won’t necessarily have to post and create content as part of your seasonal marketing efforts. As a result, you save time and ensure brand visibility no matter what level of customer activity you’re dealing with. 

Social media can also be an excellent tool for generating sales and conversions, but not if you fail to plan ahead. A solid calendar will give you the ability to transition from general messaging to more urgent, actionable content without breaking a sweat. So, when busy seasons loom on the horizon, give your social media accounts and calendars the attention they require to support your overall success. 

Are You In It to Win It? 

Liger’s looking at the year ahead, and we’d love to work with you to perfect your digital marketing campaigns via expert strategy and creative assets that are true to your brand’s mission. We understand that success is about more than just holiday marketing campaigns. It’s about brand awareness, ROI, and conversions that span the unique strengths and seasonal spikes that define your business. Whether you need a fresh start or just a little boost, Liger’s marketing professionals are ready to push you in the right direction.