It might still feel like summer but if you want to stay one step ahead of your competitors (which you do, right?) then the smart business owner is already thinking about how to maximise some key seasonal events coming up.
The two biggies are:
- Black Friday (and its friend Cyber Monday)
- Christmas
Whatever industry you’re in, you’ve got an opportunity to capitalise on both of these events.
Black Friday is the biggest internet shopping day in the UK. In 2016, stats by IMRG showed that total spend with online retailers was £1.23bn, a 12.2% increase on the year before. It’s not just B2C businesses who can profit though. There are less B2B businesses taking advantage which leaves you with a great opportunity to lead the way in offering something exclusive for your customers.
As for Christmas…of course, everyone does some sort of Christmas marketing campaign but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. It’s the peak buying season for many businesses after all. But, if you start planning now, it gives you more scope to do something creative that will help you stand out from the crowd and capture your audience’s interest.
So, how do you go about planning a seasonal marketing campaign?
Alongside being a freelance copywriter, I’m also a marketing strategist and I help small businesses plan their marketing campaigns big and small. And these are the five key steps I’ve followed to plan and run successful seasonal campaigns…
1. Research
Before I plan any campaign, I look at the following information and data (if I have it):
- Campaign data, feedback, and learnings from the previous year
- Successful (and unsuccessful) competitor/industry seasonal campaigns
- Non-seasonal marketing campaigns data, feedback, and learnings
All of the above helps me to understand what works, what doesn’t work and the learnings we need to take into any future plans. If you don’t have this data, or you haven’t run any marketing campaigns previously, you can at least look at what other people did last Black Friday and Christmas and garner how successful they were from the information you can find. This will also help give you ideas from a creative perspective.
2. Budget and Objectives
Next, you need to determine what the desired outcome of your marketing campaign is, and how much budget you can spend on it. For example, you may want to encourage your existing customers to spend more money with you. Or, you might want to acquire new customers. Either way, knowing this from the outset will help you determine the type of activity, offer and messaging of the campaign.
You don’t need to get too detailed here, just decide the answers to the following questions:
- What’s your goal?
- How will you measure it?
- How much marketing budget will you spend on this?