INSIGHTS

Seasonal marketing is about promoting your products or services at certain points of the year.
Find out why we recommend thinking about your seasonal marketing for Christmas this Summer…

To have an impactful and successful marketing campaign, you need to build anticipation, so starting your marketing efforts early and planning out your marketing campaigns is vital to success.

Depending on your industry, the summer months are often quieter in the office (lots of people use up their annual leave!) but, rather than letting the summer months pass you by in a haze of beer gardens and BBQs, we strongly recommend utilising this time to have a look at your plans for the months ahead and create a clear strategy that you can use when you’re flat out. You’ll thank yourself for it in the future.

Even if summer is a particularly busy time for you and your industry, consider if you can spare a few hours to think about things now. The summer months offer creativity and with colleagues working together collaboratively and the ideas flowing it can feel much more like fun than a chore – and the finished product is often a lot more creative and engaging as a result!

The team at CreativeHutch HQ have a morning set aside this summer just for this purpose – helping us to get ready in plenty of time and have fun while doing it!

OK, what shall we do?

Start with a calendar and plot in key dates – not just when “Awareness Days” are, but also when key things are happening in your industry or seasonal trends you’ve seen. Making a calendar ensures nothing is missed. Think about the next 6 months ahead as a minimum but up to 12 is ideal.

Try and get input from as many people as possible at this stage. Everyone has different experiences and cultural references, so understanding what they want to see and taking on creative ideas at this stage makes for a far more interesting content calendar. Get people round a table and start jotting down ideas – you can always flesh it out later.

From here, plan backwards a little way… If you want to get promotions live on specific days, then think about what you need to do to get to that date. You’ll need to build excitement for at least two weeks in advance and will also have to space out your email marketing and ad campaigns so that your audience isn’t overwhelmed by your competitors or your own messages squeezed into a short time frame.

Think next about the type of content you’re going to need to support your campaigns, not just any words but will you need something specific added to your website or any visual content like images, infographics or video to promote your campaign? Again you need to plan backwards against your planned dates – if you need a video and a 500 blog article then how many days or weeks will you need to get the campaign ready for the dates?

You can soon see how, by planning backwards, you can find yourself working on Christmas Campaigns in August (or January 11 months before!). Also why it’s key to get started sooner rather than later and use the summer months to your advantage. 

Have fun with it, be creative and you’ll thank yourself in the future.

Not got time to produce a marketing plan or would like some expert assistance?
Reach out to us and we can help you produce a marketing plan – or do it for you.