Planning, creating and executing a flawless marketing strategy all year round takes a lot of time and effort. Add to that other seasonal occasions where you want to share in the excitement, and promote your product or service and it can seem like one too many items on the to-do list. So how do you seasonally promote your business without using all your time and resources on a flashy campaign? We have some simple tips to update your online presence for any season:
Make Basic Changes To Your Website
This doesn’t mean a huge shift with lots of rework, but updating your messaging in key areas to suit the season is a wise idea. For example, housebuilders may want to look at ‘moving in time for Christmas’ messaging that should take a prominent place on the home page and/or search page. If you are running Christmas events, making sure they are easily visible and given priority in the main navigation is a quick change that can drive a big impact.
Update Your Social Channel Imagery
This is a fast and simple change that can significantly improve your everyday visibility. Making small design changes such as updating your logo can help. For example, changing an O to a pumpkin or bauble, or updating a flag for a football tournament (as we did for our client Jelson Homes). If you don’t have the resources to change your logo, even updating your channel header image is a good move. For housebuilders, this can be as simple as adding a new image of one of their show homes that have been dressed with a Christmas tree.
Plan Seasonal Content Into Your Social Schedule
Working in advance is the best way to prepare for upcoming seasonal events. Set yourself reminders to start planning for smaller, one-day events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The back end of the year sees the most seasonal events: Halloween, Christmas, New Year, so start to think about this earlier in the year, plan your copy to include seasonal references for housebuilders this could be ‘move in for the New Year’ messaging. Think about your creatives on social, you can easily give a nod to the season through colours, add in some orange and black for Halloween, red and green for Christmas and you’re all set! Instagram Stories are not only great for engagements, but they’re also perfect to reference the season and festivities through the use of GIFs and stickers that are already provided by the platform.
Update Your Opening Hours On Google
This may seem like a really basic item, but many businesses miss this in their seasonal marketing strategy. On your Google Business profile, you can add seasonal hours. So, if your hours are changing over a bank holiday or you’re closing for Christmas, you should update your opening hours. That means if any of your customers do search for you online, they can find your temporarily changed opening hours. So if you’re closed, they won’t be disappointed with no response, or if they were thinking of visiting they have the reassurance you are open.
You also need to remember:
Keep It In Line With Your Brand And Audience
Though we want to acknowledge and celebrate the season, we don’t want to lose ourselves in it. Think of your main audience and what they expect from your brand. If it is something more professional, a subtle hint to the festivities will likely be enough, but if you have more of a lively audience then you can afford to go with something a bit more fun. Stay true to who you are, whilst acknowledging the season.
Keep It Consistent
If you do decide to do something like updating your logo to something a bit more seasonal, then keep it consistent by updating the logo on all social channels, your website and any other seasonal marketing material (like an email campaign). You should set reminders to change everything back when the time comes, but all visual cues for users should be consistent. Also, if you’re going to the effort of seasonally updating your branding, why not make the most of it?
Think Ahead
These annual events come around quicker than you think, and unless you have a big team with a lot of time and resources, it’s difficult to produce the extra seasonal content as and when. You need to think ahead, even if that’s a year ahead. For housebuilders, this could be asking the right questions on your social channels at seasonal times to produce some user-generated content with photos of your homes dressed for Christmas or Halloween. Then (with the user's permission) these could be reshared the following year in the run-up to the occasion.
If your business could benefit from having an expert agency at your marketing team's disposal, then why not have a chat with one of our team today, or take a look at what we’ve done for our other clients?
