Seasonal Marketing Strategies: How to Leverage Holidays and Harvests
Michigan strawberries from Farmer White’s.
Whether your products fluctuate during the year or not, your business is guaranteed to have seasonal variability. From holidays to elections, there are plenty of reasons why sales ebb and flow. With a little planning, you can use seasonal shifts in your products or consumer behaviors to your advantage and grow your sales.
While there are innate challenges in seasonal variability, it also presents some opportunities:
There’s always something new to promote, which is exciting for customers
It allows you to take advantage of urgency and exclusivity as marketing tactics
Explore the recommendations below and start experimenting with different seasonal marketing strategies!
Plant a Seed
Dropping a hint about an upcoming offer or exclusive product is a great way to build anticipation and get customers hyped. It encourages them to continue following your business so they don’t miss your offer, and mentally prepares them to make a purchase.
Experiment with timing–see whether a month’s notice drives more sales than a week, and use that knowledge to make data-driven decisions for future promotions.
Get Creative with How You Can Solve Your Customers’ Problems
Holidays often bring on stress, so brainstorm some ways your business can mitigate stress for customers. Some ideas include:
Product Bundles
Offer a collection of related items that cover the bases, such as a salad produce box with greens, a bottled dressing from another local business, and veggies to top the salad.
Home Delivery
Offer home delivery (for free or a small fee) for a limited time prior to bigger holidays such as the Fourth of July or Labor Day. Customers who get your products more easily may be more likely to purchase.
Offer Preorders
Allow customers to make orders ahead of time to claim their products. This is mutually beneficial for you and the customer: they don’t have to worry about missing out, and you have guaranteed sales of future products!
Learn how to write effective product descriptions to promote your products!
Before you start brainstorming, it can help to generate a list of potential struggles your target audience faces. It’s easier to develop solutions when you have a clear problem to solve!
Use Urgency & Exclusivity to Encourage Sales
These strategies can be applied both to limited harvests and holiday promotions. Using phrases like “limited time only” or “while they last” are great ways to speed up sales.
Consider strawberry season: if customers miss the purchase window, they have to wait a whole year for local strawberries. Be sure to remind your customers of that! Not everyone is as familiar with produce seasonality as farmers.
For holidays, entice your customers with your unique holiday offerings, and let them know those deals won’t be around forever!
If you experiment with preorders, you could try giving your email subscribers first access as a show of good faith. Promoting this on social media is also a great way to convert social media followers into email subscribers!
Plan Ahead
We always recommend businesses use a marketing calendar in order to see the big picture of their marketing efforts and stay on course. If you don’t have one yet, now is the time to set one up!
Include a list of holidays or business milestones (think: cherry season, garlic scape season, etc) and brainstorm different ideas to promote your products before and during those periods. Use some of the ideas presented here, or develop your own! When the time comes, you’ll have your plan in place; all you have to do is follow it.
Not sure where to begin making a marketing plan? We can help :)