How to Plan a Seasonal Marketing Campaign: A 5-Step Guide

How to Plan a Seasonal Marketing Campaign: A 5-Step Guide. How to Plan a Seasonal Marketing Campaign: A 5-Step Guide Step #1: Choose a seasonal opportunity. In simple terms, one of the key routes to success with seasonal campaigns is using an opportunity that engages your audience. When evaluating existing, successful campaigns, spend some time thinking about how each piece approached content format, distribution, messaging, and emotion. Step #2: Nail down the messaging. As with any marketing campaign, your seasonal campaign messaging is so important. Plan around that, too. This simple idea -- ‘A Guide to the Ultimate Christmas Dinner’ -- manifested into a truly successful campaign that spanned many different content formats and platforms. Getting Started With 2017 coming at us full steam ahead, begin to think about which seasonal events your brand could benefit from over the next 12 months. What are your best tips for planning a seasonal campaign?

Create Your B2B Video Marketing Strategy in 4 Easy Steps
How Location Data Is Reshaping Mobile Advertising and Attribution
How marketers are wrestling with virtual reality’s adoption issue
Seasonal-Campaign-compressor.jpg

Seasonal events and celebrations present different opportunities for different business sectors. For many brands, seasonal opportunities are huge and often the most commercially critical times of the financial year.

But planning an effective seasonal campaign not only takes a lot of organisation, it also takes a considerable amount of time. For this reason, smaller brands tend to let these opportunities come and go without making the most of them.

Rather than miss out on an opportunity to connect with you audience and leverage the ongoing conversation during any given season, we put together some tips designed to help you get your campaign off the ground. Let’s walk through them below.

How to Plan a Seasonal Marketing Campaign: A 5-Step Guide

Step #1: Choose a seasonal opportunity.

When choosing a season to serve as the jumping off point for your campaign, it’s important that you’re being strategic. In simple terms, one of the key routes to success with seasonal campaigns is using an opportunity that engages your audience. If your audience doesn’t engage with the season itself, you can’t expect to see results from a campaign centred around it.

That said, if you have conducted research into your audience, then you’ll likely know their attitudes around these big seasonal events and should be able to pair that with an event that suits your product or service.

Audit Existing Seasonal Campaigns

Once you have decided on a seasonal event to utilise for a campaign, have a look at some of the last few years’ most successful content campaigns for this occasion — Ahrefs and BuzzSumo are great places to start with this. When evaluating existing, successful campaigns, spend some time thinking about how each piece approached content format, distribution, messaging, and emotion.

When validating a campaign, you might find that it’s helpful to ask yourself the following questions:

  • How has this piece used multiple content types and distribution platforms?
  • Is the messaging clear and if so, what is it?
  • What emotion does this campaign evoke in the user?

This type of analysis makes it easier for you to uncover common denominators that may inspire the ideation for your own campaign and contribute to your strategy when planning.

Gather Insights via External Outreach

If you’re looking for an outsider’s opinion, try doing some outreach to journalists or various digital publications that have previously covered some of the campaigns you analyzed above.

By sending out some feelers to see what kind of content they like to post around your chosen season, and when they like to receive press releases for these pieces, is a valuable way to spend a couple of hours or so.

That isn’t to say you must take the feedback you get as gospel, but it is good to bear in mind when you are planning your seasonal campaign.

Step #2: Nail down the messaging.

As with any marketing campaign, your seasonal campaign messaging is so important. To help you get started, you should be thinking the following:

  • The customer journey and the story you want to tell
  • The emotions you want to evoke in your audience
  • A call-to-action or the desired next steps you want to encourage

In 2013, MegaRed — a company that sells a type of krill oil supplement that is good for your heart — launched a noteworthy digital Valentine’s Day campaign.

The basis of the campaign was simple: ‘Whose Heart do you Love?’ consisted of a…

COMMENTS

WORDPRESS: 0
DISQUS: 0