As a B-to-B company, seasonality should be built into your marketing strategy.
Seasonal marketing is nothing new, especially for B-to-C companies (who often spend significant chunks of their marketing budgets around holidays and special events like Black Friday).
For B-to-B companies seasonality matters, too—the difference is, the “seasons” aren’t defined and driven by holidays, but by whatever products and services they’re selling.
When is your capacity greatest? That’s like your Black Friday.
For a company like our client Quality Blacktopping weather plays a huge role in their sales cycle. Like many of our commercial construction clients, they have more work than they can handle in the summer and fall—but they’re wide open in winter, when companies aren’t thinking about the upkeep of their parking lot. Seasonal marketing for Quality Blacktopping includes winter promotions and early booking opportunities.
For a client like Dinsmore Homestead (who coordinates hundreds of school visits per year), it’s all about the school year’s predictable cycle, so summertime when kids are home, they are busiest. Similarly, many companies have to take summer travel into consideration: if your client isn’t going to be in the office in July, no point marketing to them then—or in the weeks immediately following, when they’re trying to dig out from being OOO.
For many of our clients the year-end budget timeframe is critical. Know when your prospects reach their final quarter and start setting their budget for the next cycle: it’s a perfect moment for you to put your products or services in front of them. Have your campaign ready to go, and get it in front of them when the time is right.
For them.
You might have to work just a little harder to determine the impact of seasonality on your business, and where to best spend your time and budget. But it’s worth it.
Seasonal marketing is not a replacement for ongoing efforts.
Your normal marketing efforts—the so-called ‘evergreen content’—remains important.
Seasonality is just an opportunity to beef up your plan, and reinforce your unique selling proposition.
Getting ahead of the curve is essential to running a successful seasonal campaign. So is consistency in messaging across email, advertisements, webpage design and social media platforms: your brand is your brand, no matter what today’s date is.
You want to be discovered offline and online all year round. Your brand is what customers will recognize, form attachments to, and always come back to.
SEO considerations for seasonal marketing.
From a digital marketing perspective, consistent year-round marketing is essential for maintaining and improving your search engine rankings. Search engines reward websites that produce fresh and relevant content, so you do not neglect your core digital marketing strategy while focusing on more seasonal efforts.
Digital marketing techniques are invaluable to seasonal marketing—tools such as Google Trends or a keyword planner are brilliant for establishing what your audience is looking for, and when. They allow you to spot patterns or recurring trends year on year.
In fact, Google Trends will give you an indication of how far in advance of the event people began to look for related search terms.
Then use Google Analytics to see if spikes in your own website traffic correspond to specific, timely search terms—which you can then make a concerted effort to target.
You might just have to make a new season, all by yourself.
If you don’t notice a particular seasonality to your business, well, you might be able to create one.
Hot seasons and sales spikes don’t always occur by themselves, as if nature or the tilt of the earth’s axis automatically causes them.
Think about what you offer, and when your customers are most likely to receptive to it—with imagination, planning and effort, you might just have a whole new holiday to mark on your calendar.
