Evolving Seasonal Marketing

The holiday campaign; if you’re in B2C marketing, this topic likely drives a lot of your seasonal marketing plans and calendars. It’s understandable. U.S. consumers spent a total of $936.3 billion during the 2022 holiday season. And even outside of the November-December purchasing season, many other cyclical events probably influence your marketing strategy and ultimately your revenue trends.

Surface level efforts to tap into holiday spending habits and develop holiday messaging are a wasted effort though if they don’t deeply resonate with your consumer in a way that is also specific to your brand. After all, what good does it do your brand if you’re simply parroting the same seasonal offers or messages as your competitors? Pride Month is an obvious example of where many brands have fallen short in this area. Consumers are quick to pick up on promises, statements, or products that feel inauthentic or hollow. Lackluster efforts don’t just fall flat, they can even backfire.

No matter where you find yourself in the fiscal year, it’s never too late to reexamine your marketing calendar and ask the question “Does this matter to my customer?”

I previously worked for a national residential cleaning brand. To no one’s surprise, the spring cleaning campaign was a big focus. Leadership and franchisees were very invested in making sure the brand had a strong presence during what was typically a busy season for the industry. The expectation was clear. Phrases like “a fresh start” and “spring is in the air” were the norm not just for my brand, but also for the competition. The reality though was that our core customers didn’t care about this. They expected a clean home year-round. And even in the twenty-first century, most of our customers were women, and most of them were also busy moms.

“Surface level efforts to tap into holiday spending habits and develop holiday messaging are a wasted effort though if they don’t deeply resonate with your consumer in a way that is also specific to your brand.”

That year, we scrapped a traditional spring cleaning campaign. Instead, we focused on Mother’s Day in a big way. We partnered with another major consumer brand and dozens of influencers to share and celebrate the real stories of moms who were champions both in and out of the home. We sent every franchisee collateral to use with their customers who were mothers. We launched a national giveaway that allowed people to nominate a mom figure in their life for an incredible prize package and had so many nominations that we actually opted to select additional winners.

The results? Showing our customers that we know them and value them, standing out from our competition in a meaningful way during a busy season, increasing engagement and reach across nearly all our channels, generating excitement from our franchisees about a campaign that was truly new and different, and of course, solidifying solid revenue performance throughout the spring season.

The structure of the campaign also helped us better quantify the efficacy of different channels throughout our marketing funnel and further optimize future campaigns. Finally, in addition to meaningfully connecting with our current customers, we also collected thousands of leads for our franchisees and created a dedicated re-targeting campaign specific to that audience.

The next time a stakeholder asks you about your upcoming seasonal or holiday campaign, I challenge you to pause before you respond. Consider what is actually emotive for your target audience and resist the temptation to create a campaign simply because it’s what everyone else in your industry does.