How to Leverage Seasonal Marketing Strategies for your Small Business

India is the land of festivities and celebrations. For small business owners, it is an excellent opportunity to leverage on seasonal marketing strategies to increase sales, retain and acquire customers.

But how can small business leverage seasonal marketing strategies? The trick is to be subtle, and not overwhelm customers with overly-friendly family discounts.

What is Seasonal marketing? How does it work?

Have you noticed that your website traffic fluctuates in annual cycles? For small businesses with an online presence, the demand for products and services depend on seasonality. Simply put, seasonal marketing is when a company markets their products at specific cycles in the year to increase sales.

Seasonal marketing involves targeting important events, national and public holidays and quite literally, the different seasons I.e the weather cycle. Seasonal marketing starts with your team looking at the calendar, marking dates to push campaigns and capitalising on the opportunities they present. In India, those opportunities are plenty. From summer, monsoons, winters to festivals like Diwali, Holi, Christmas, Eid and regional festivals too.

Seasonal marketing strategies allow your brand to drive more attention to your product or service in the interest of boosting your business revenue. How? Simple, if people are looking to buy raincoats and cotton wear for the monsoons, sell them!

The core motive of implementing seasonal marketing is to develop an immediate need for the product. Products and services you can buy within the season periods, which could lose relevance one it is over, like Christmas cakes!

Small Business Seasonal Marketing Strategies:

Start Early with Keyword Research:

It might be the monsoon season now, but it is never too late to start marketing for Winter. Leverage the right trends if you want to benefit from the season, and a simple Google keywords search for that particular seasonal campaign can help kickstart your marketing plan way before the season actually starts. For example, you can carry out a quick keyword search on Google Trends with the word ‘ Winter,’ and you’ll find a list of exact queries that people looked up during the season.

Starting early, before the season commences gives you a heads up before the rest of your competition. Keyword research lets you keep track of search volume and when it grows the most. Keep your point of focus on what a user’s intent for the search might be.

Increase engagement on social media:

Leverage your social media marketing wisely before the seasonal marketing campaign sets in motion. Spend regular time on social posts year-round.  This will promote interest among new customers about what your products are. A few strategies you can adopt are:

• Include attractive graphics to get your customers attention to getting more likes. This will boost the chances of the post appearing in customer feeds and increase shares for visibility.
• Do not shy from making promotional videos
• Ask your customer base questions, conduct polls ahead of the season.

Provide a limited-time discount code and personalised experience:

Seasonal marketing campaigns allow you to bank on customers needs and emotions. Provide your customers with a personalised experience on the website. Change your logo to suit the season. Think of customers’ greatest pain points and find ways to take away the stress of holiday shopping for them. Maintain a friendly tone in your promotions:

• Offer clearance discounts post the season
• Offer free delivery for huge purchases.
• Target your audience smartly. In India, the festive season focuses heavily on family. Family values, gifting, sharing and the advertisements and promotions speak for themselves.

Plan a Retargeting and Remarketing Campaign:

One of the sliest and efficient types of getting customers is retargeting. It’s simple to understand. If your customers are looking for summer beachwear, with retargeting, they will start to see your brand’s summer accessories ads online. With retargeting, customers allow cookies to track their online behaviour and ads show up on the customers’ website. Seasonal marketing strategies are best for this method.

This way, you can target customers trying hotel bookings for the holiday season, online shopping for seasonal attire and more. Retargeting works wonders for seasonal marketing because it helps keep your site and brand and products top of mind.

Create a Google Ads campaign:

 Google Ads allow users to search and find your products while they are looking for similar items and information on Google.

Target the right keyword, especially words people will likely use in their search that relates to your products. Make use of a good keyword research tool to find frequently searched words related to your product. If your company sells cotton clothes, look up keywords like ” Summer Clothes for South India’ or ‘Cotton wear for Summer’. After that, create landing pages for these products and target these keywords when you advertise on Google.

Tips:

• Keep a CTA (Call-To-Action) or an ultimatum. Example: “Only 3 days of Summer”
• Leverage on seasonal words like ” Happy Holidays!” Use words like ‘Free’, ‘ Limited Period’ and ‘
• When you create a Google Ads campaign early, you can test and refine results all day.

A smart marketing move can work wonders for your business. It’s all about knowing what your customer wants and using that to work to your benefit. Happy customers mean increased sales. Got some interesting marketing strategies that worked for you? Let us know in comments!

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