If you fail to shift with the consumer, chances are they will drop you the minute they find a more relevant alternative. Therefore, rigidity is your biggest threat in the age of digital disruption. Especially in your business model. One thing that is constantly shifting is the consumers' emotional pattern throughout the year. Understanding these emotions will help you adjust your marketing efforts accordingly because a consumer's emotion is what determines how they notice, share, recall, or buy your product or service. Read ahead to find out what seasonal marketing is and how harnessing consumer emotions strategically can boost your marketing efforts.
What Is Seasonal Marketing?
Seasonal marketing is a marketing approach that focuses on leveraging consumer behavior and demand power during special holidays and events. With a repeated cycle of yearlong holidays and special events, there is always an anticipation of heightened consumer emotions forming a potent springboard for your marketing efforts.
Consumers behave in a certain predictable way during specific seasons and you can use this to your marketing advantage. Be it Christmas, Black Friday, Halloween, Valentine's Day, Father's Day, or Mother's Day, the cycle is never-ending and even before the excitement from one holiday season subsides, the next one is already knocking on your door. Therefore, seasonal marketing is a powerful channel to disseminate your brand message when you can accurately predict the kind of consumer emotion dominating the season. Here are a few ways to make your seasonal marketing efforts pay off and how to adjust your marketing strategy, budget, brand message, and approach to align with seasonal consumer emotions.
Master Your Audience
If you don't know your audience, how will you know the kind of brand message that resonates with their emotions? Not knowing the right emotion to target in your marketing campaigns is your greatest hurdle. Why? Because targeting the right emotion triggers the right response. This calls for in-depth target audience research to learn your consumers' pain points, dreams, and general expectations. Narrow down their specific needs by creating several buyer personas.
Plan Early
Plan out your marketing campaigns early into the season. This ensures you not only end up with impactful but also successful campaigns because of the anticipation built in the process. Part of the planning involves making an annual calendar of all the major holidays and events. This is important because each holiday comes with different consumer expectations. Be selective in the holidays you want to leverage on and research the likely consumer habits in that season.
Some of the popular holidays and events to consider include:
- Summer-Independence Day, Flag Day, and Labor Day as well as Summer weather, Shark Week, and vacations
- Winter-Christmas, New Year's Eve and Day, Valentine's Day, not forgetting events like Super Bowl, snowy weather, and online shopping
- Fall-Thanksgiving, Halloween, Black Friday, and Veterans Day, and popular events like football and back to school
- Spring-Easter, Memorial Day, Father's Day, Mother's Day, and April Fool's day not to mention Spring sports, weather, and bright color schemes
To hit the emotional nail right on the head, plan for season-specific content with these holidays, themes, and events in mind.
Become A Storyteller
Packaging your brand message in a relatable story helps you connect with your audience faster than just a bland promotional campaign. A compelling story can evoke different emotions like passion, excitement, or sadness that all may trigger buying decisions in different ways. As long as your story resonates with the consumers' daily occurrences and experiences, you are good to go.
These three tips can help you tell an outstanding brand story:
- Map out the customer journey and the story you intend to tell
- Know how to evoke the right emotions
- Add a compelling call-to-action prompt
Work On An Emotive And Evocative Visual Appeal
As you tell your story compellingly, think of weaving some great imagery into the seasonal content. This is where your A-game on graphic design is needed. Because holidays are marked with colors, decorations, and customized themes, your marketing content should too.
Try as much as possible to leverage specific colors and decorations in all your brand messaging to achieve consistency. You could tweak your emojis, email headers, or social media profile pictures to resonate with the holiday spirit and keep the conversation going. This will help spark interest and evoke positive emotions from your audience.
Understand The Current Promotional Trends
With much uncertainty hovering over the economy, consumers are responding to the uncertainty differently. The best you can do is opt for a marketing strategy that promotes hope and inspires consumer trust at first sight.
As most consumers are shifting to online buying to save more on spending, you can tailor your brand message to promote wise spending and saving. You should also understand the age diversity within your target audience and find out why they would buy from you. Millennials and Gen Z prefer entertaining messages whereas Baby boomers and Gen X are more inclined toward informative messages infused with some savings content. To evoke instant emotions, you can also offer free delivery services and support your claims with customer testimonials to cement trust.
How Does Emotional Marketing Help You Sell?
Emotional marketing plays a significant role in helping you:
- Create a striking and memorable first impression
- Compel consumers to make buying decisions with their hearts, not their heads
- Inspire consumers to act in a certain way to promote your brand visibility e.g., share your social media post
Partner With A Digital Expert
Weaving some emotion into your brand message is a sure way to attract, agree with, and stimulate your customers and prospects to buy. Keenly study your audience and their emotions and then infuse that knowledge into your marketing goals. That way you will have succeeded in seasonal marketing.
