Ways To Embrace Seasonal Content Marketing

Think Big SEO – X Ways To Embrace/Use Seasonal Content Marketing

Content creators constantly strive to keep audiences engaged with fresh, relevant pieces of information. Part of the purpose of having a functional content marketing strategy includes being able to drive sales. In an effort to connect with audiences and increase profits, businesses often create seasonal content and offers. In doing so, they keep up with current events, acknowledge dates that matter to their audiences, and drive more visitors to their stores and webpages.

If you’d like to take advantage of the opportunities that unique seasonal content provides, it’s a good idea to start working on a seasonal content marketing strategy.

If you’ve never created seasonal content, here are six easy tips to get you started.

Planning for the Season Around Your Business

Creating seasonal content should reflect your business practices and strive to attract the right audience. As such, one piece of seasonal content should be unique from those of other companies. It’s best to plan seasonal content around your business rather than molding your business around seasonal content.

For example, it’s a good idea to take a long look at what services your business provides throughout the year, then apply promotions and additional information around certain times of the year. A jeweler may focus on publishing more content supporting Mother’s Day or Valentine’s Day than any other time of the year.

A company offering business solutions might try focusing seasonal content on tax season, the winter holidays, or the beginning of the year. These are times when businesses are looking for helpful tools and services, and have money to invest.

Think about what you do as a business and design your seasonal content so that it satisfies what you already know your audience wants.

Creating Seasonal Content

When creating seasonal content, it’s a good idea to take a broader approach than simply focusing on big-name holidays. There are all sorts of mini-seasons throughout the year, so make the most of them.

It’s beneficial to touch on seasons you know your audience enjoys. If you’re selling goods and services, Black Friday is a seasonal time in which your content can shine. If your company has anything to do with sports, publish content about baseball season, hunting season, or any other special time period where your audience is particularly engaged.

This does not mean that you should ignore popular holidays. It’s a good idea to take part in seasonal holidays and festivities as well as smaller seasons. When creating content around bigger holidays, it’s beneficial to be inclusive. For example, if you’re including Hanukkah and Kwanzaa along with Christmas in your holiday content, you’re likely going to pull in a wider selection of viewers.

Branch Off A Bit

When creating seasonal content, it’s important to remember that the businesses competing with you are likely writing seasonal content as well.

For this reason, it’s a good idea to set yourself apart from the competition by mixing your content up and branching out from the norm.

To do this, focus on some of the lesser-known holidays and seasons. They’re easy to find, being that practically every day on the calendar is some sort of holiday.

Chocolate Cake Day, Make A Friend Day, Dentists Day, and World Health Day are just a few obscure holidays to observe. If you’d like, take a look at the long list of holidays observable each month to see if any of them pertain to your business. You’re sure to find a few holidays that no other businesses are writing about.

Develop A Seasonal Schedule

Like any content marketing strategy, seasonal content should be developed on a schedule. However, when it comes to releasing seasonal content, scheduling can be difficult.

It’s advisable to post seasonal content before other businesses do, but it’s also important not to post it too early. Posting seasonal content too late will make it to where your content blends into the background with many other pieces that other companies release. Posting too early can mean that you miss the mark and no one is even interested in the season yet.

Ideally, you want to post seasonal content about major holidays 4 to 6 weeks before the date itself. If you’re posting about a smaller, more obscure season or holiday, it’s okay to post your content 1 to 2 weeks before the beginning of the season.

When you’ve planned exactly when your content would be ideal to post, you can start developing a content marketing strategy that gives you plenty of time to come up with high-quality pieces of content. This way you can proofread and edit without having to rush.

“Decorate” Your Store or Website

If you’d like to show support for a seasonal cause or get into the spirit of a certain holiday, you can do so by changing your store or website’s design. Put up decorations or graphics to show your acknowledgment of the upcoming season. If you want to introduce promotions during Easter or Halloween, for example, you can embed seasonal music or videos onto your homepage. If you have a physical store, decorating the windows or counters is also a smart move.

Introduce Seasonal Items

Starbucks is a great example of why this method works. As soon as the fall season approaches, customers arrive in droves to enjoy pumpkin spice lattes and other fall-flavored items.

It helps to note that these items are available for a limited time. Not only does it connect the product to the season itself, but it also reminds customers that the item is only available during a certain period. This encourages site and store visitors to decide more quickly whether they’d like to purchase a product or service.

Seasonal content is a great way to stay in touch with your audience and encourage more visitors to your store or website. By creating seasonal content the right way, you can not only get more leads to visit your pages, but you can also increase sales. On top of increasing sales, seasonal content can help your business convert more leads into loyal customers.

Producing seasonal content helps make your business appear more human, especially when the seasonal events you focus on involve more than the most popular holidays in your area. Being inclusive and knowing what your audience likes can go a long way.

If you’d like help to create better seasonal content for your business, contact us, and we can help. Think Big SEO is a knowledgeable marketing team, and we strive to help small businesses improve their strategies.