Seasonal Marketing Best Practices to Help Your Brand Thrive

Does your brand sell products that are more attractive to consumers during specific times of the year? By using seasonal marketing best practices, you can make the most of time-sensitive opportunities and generate more revenue.

Of course, advertising around seasons and holidays isn’t possible if you don’t know which ones are important to your brand. Reflecting on which times are most relevant to your products and your consumers is a worthwhile investment. In this article, we’ll look at some of the most important holidays and seasons to be aware of and how to create a better experience for your shoppers around these occasions.

How to Identify Seasonal Marketing Opportunities for Your Brand 

Before taking advantage of the boost in traffic and sales provided by many holidays and certain seasons, you need to figure out how your brand fits into the bigger picture. Shoppers have endless options for buying–especially online. So what makes your brand stand out?  

Product Evaluation

The most important question to ask is whether your products have any seasonality to them. Do they relate to a certain time of year? Does your inventory tie into a major holiday? Do consumers think of a special occasion when browsing your storefront? If so, you can start taking advantage of seasonal marketing. 

But you’ll need to determine the optimal time to take advantage. If you choose the wrong time to advertise your products, shoppers will be uninterested–or worse, annoyed by your attempts to show them products outside their interests. However, showing potential buyers a relevant product when they’re already excited about the holiday or season it relates to can greatly influence their decision to make a purchase. 

Common Shopping Holidays to Know

If you’re not sure your brand is seasonal (or offers seasonal products), don’t worry. The following list covers many of the most important shopping holidays and seasons. 

• Spring / summer
• Fall
• Winter
• Christmas & Hanukkah
• Black Friday / Cyber Monday
• Valentine’s Day
• Mother / Father’s Day
• Halloween 
• Local & Regional Holidays 

How to Create Seasonal-Specific Shopping Experiences

As mentioned, you can use seasons and holidays to help drive more sales for your brand. Around certain times of the year, shoppers are looking for gifts to buy and ways to treat themselves. Curating their shopping experience around these events helps elicit a positive reaction and makes shoppers associate your brand with the seasons that make them feel good. So how can you make your seasonal marketing more specific? 

Dedicated Collections

If your brand sells seasonal items, consider creating collections within the overall catalog. For instance, a brand selling Mother’s Day gifts could create collections focused on jewelry, clothing, and beauty products. 

When shoppers come to your site, they already know they want a Mother’s Day gift. Helping them narrow their search even further streamlines their shopping experience and encourages them to make a purchase sooner. 

Landing Pages for Seasonal Items

After you take time to create dedicated collections for each holiday you can repurpose them as landing pages. Your seasonal advertising probably includes some paid ads and social media content. So rather than directing shoppers who click those ads to your homepage, instead guide them to a landing page full of the seasonal products they’re interested in. 

This also prevents you from having to fully redesign your homepage as the seasons change. You can rotate items through a “featured” section and spice up your visuals with seasonal banners, but feature the bulk of your products on a landing page. 

Why Back-In-Stock Alerts Are Essential For Seasonal Brands

If your brand sells seasonal products, you already know that sales tend to come in waves. And while a huge number of orders in a short time is great for boosting your revenue, it also leads to sold-out products. Back-in-stock alerts ensure you’ll never leave customers disappointed. This tool is an essential piece of your seasonal marketing strategy. 

Capitalizing on Increased Demand

As shoppers flock to your site to make their holiday purchases, your inventory might be able to not keep up. So, you have two options. You can lose a potential customer (who will probably go buy from a competitor). Or, you can let shoppers sign up for an alert when the item they want comes back into stock.

Although you’re still likely to have more out-of-stock products during your busy seasons, it’s important to capitalize on the increased demand. Back-in-stock alerts allow you to retain shoppers’ interest while you wait for more inventory to arrive. 

The best back-in-stock alerts even include similar product recommendations for shoppers to check out in the meantime. If shoppers are interested in your other offerings, a single alert can lead to even more revenue.

Maximize Your Data for Marketing

Swym’s Back in Stock Alerts app generates actionable data to help you plan your inventory and visualize demand for your products more easily. This also enables you to create highly targeted marketing campaigns for your products. 

When shoppers sign up for a back-in-stock alert, give them the choice to opt-in to your marketing list. This way, you can send promotional emails to an audience that is already engaged and interested in your products. You can also use the data to create powerful seasonal marketing campaigns for social media to re-engage your shoppers. 

Thanks to back-in-stock subscription data, you’ll better understand how shoppers engage with your products. In turn, your marketing campaigns will become more powerful. 

Planning for the Future

Of course, you always want your items to be in stock so shoppers can purchase them. So when you plan to order inventory for new products or re-stocks, having the correct data makes all the difference. 

The reports generated by Swym’s Back in Stock Alerts app show you how many customers are interested in your seasonal products so you can adjust your inventory management plan to match. You can track this data over time to predict how demand will change. This is especially useful for seasonal brands that might sell a lot of products in a small window but still sell smaller amounts at other times of the year. 

Interested in learning how the Back In Stock Alerts app can help your seasonal brand thrive? Check out our product page or contact us via email at support@swymcorp.com for more information!