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Seasonal Marketing: A Big Bang at the Right Time!

Guest post by: MIchael Daley

Article Overview: Seasonal demand is critical to your marketing budget. Understanding seasonality can help you plan events, inventory, and staffing.

Seasonal Marketing: A Big Bang at the Right Time!

When you are a small business owner, marketing can become overwhelming. In many cases you are trying to make sales and do not have much time to consider all the different aspects of marketing. What do I focus on to market my product or service is a frequent question. Is it branding, social media, blogging, cold calls, advertising, CRM, traditional media, etc.? In fact, all of them are important. That is why I recommend entrepreneurs prepare a marketing calendar. This can be a simple task and there are many templates on the web that can provide a guideline for this. One aspect of marketing many business owners do not consider is seasonality. I see this lack of seasonality quite a bit in cash flow forecasts prepared by owners in their business plans. However, it is important to market to your prospects when they are most likely to be thinking about your product or service. This can stretch your budget and improve your response rates and sales conversions. Seasonality is a characteristic of a time series in which sales data experiences regular, predictable changes and which recur every calendar year. Any predictable change or pattern in a time series that recurs or repeats over a one-year period can be said to be seasonal. Seasonality can be seen in many time series and it’s more common than some people might think. For instance, a company that sells sunscreen and tanning products would see sales jump up in the summer, especially in northern markets but drop in winter. For example, if you are marketing a health and wellness product or service, what would be the natural time of year to focus your marketing? That’s easy! Coincide with January and all those New Year's resolutions to lose weight and get in shape. Another example is that it can be a serious reference for purchasing behavior inherent in the lives of salaried workers. People tend to buy products like food and other household products when they get paid. So certain times of the month can be seasonal. The lengths to which marketers are incorporating the seasonal behavior into what would have once been sacrosanct branding and marketing plans is truly amazing. Let’s look at the Payday Season as an example: • Content:All the talk about promoting "value" is just marketingspeak codeword for relenting on the absolutes of brand, and finding messages that are relevant to consumer needs. At paycheck time, the fundamental need is to buy something, so messaging is far less about emotion, and far more about utility • Channels: Is a conversation via some social media tool the best way to get the message out to payday shoppers? Probably not. Keep an eye out for a resurgence in drive-time media, like radio, and POP (like coupons). And lots more direct marketing. One of the primary benefits of being "a loyal member" of something should be getting access to payday purchase discounts • Distribution: Different packaging configurations depending on time of the month (larger at payday, vs. smaller units for when money is running out), and making sure the right products are available during the right periods are probably far more important than marketing an intangible emotional quality • Price:This is the simplest and perhaps most compelling tool for dealing with the new seasonality, only it might be counter-intuitive to standard practices: shouldn’t prices be lower when consumers are flush with paychecks, to encourage them to spend a lot and do so habitually? Can’t prices can be higher later in the month when consumers have the money to spend? I think these are grand ideas, not only because it challenges marketers to get even more connected to the sales reality of the businesses, but it allows them to refocus their attention on prompting behaviors, not just intentions, conversation, or the happy thoughts of most branding. If you truly look at the seasonality of your product or service, then maybe it means that marketers can start getting out of the habit of waiting for the holidays, or the other long-term seasonal certitudes of planning that aren't so certain anymore...and embrace new definitions of periodicity in their marketplaces.

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Article Tags: context, distribution, marketing, marketing budget, marketing calendar, seasonal, seasonality



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