Aligning marketing with seasonal events – like Easter, Christmas, or Mother’s Day – helps to boost your visibility during lucrative shopping events, deliver highly-relevant content to your customers and align your brand with trending social conversations. But there are challenges as well as benefits.
Seasonal campaigns are popular. Running one during some of the year’s busiest sale periods means you’ll be competing to win the attention of your customers even more than usual. That’s why it’s important to innovate and bring fresh ideas that will help your brand cut through the clutter.
Where to start?
First, decide which seasonal events are relevant to your brand. While there are the obvious ones – like Valentine’s Day and Father’s Day – there are also plenty of weird and wonderful national holidays which could be a great fit for your brand. Consider World Sleep Day or International Dog Day. Remember the more niche events could bring greater relevance to your brand’s campaign and less competition to go upagaist.
Pro tip: Use a content calendar to find the yearly events that align the best with your brand. Next, think about the unique spin you could put on it that will help set your brand apart.
Engage with relatable influencers
Since Easter is just around the corner, let’s take a look at how you could innovate your Easter campaigns and achieve social success. Typically Easter is celebrated with family and friends. Since audiences identify with stories that feel relatable, engaging family-focused influencers in your campaigns can help your customers feel an emotional connection to your brand and can imagine your products in their celebrations.
Emotions are a powerful driving force when it comes to shopping. Brands that have the strongest emotional connection with their customers tend to have two times the number of people willing to pay 20% more for their product, according to a 2019 BIS report.
Influencers are expert storytellers and their ability to spark joy, happiness, excitement or nostalgia can bring your brand to life and drive conversions. This is particularly powerful for brands who don’t feel like their brand naturally aligns with Easter, but have a story to tell.
Innovate your content themes
While Easter is traditionally a family affair, lockdown restrictions mean celebrations will continue to look different this year. With social distancing measures still in place for many countries, big family gatherings won’t be happening, some will still be separated and customers may still be avoiding the shops. Keep these things in mind to keep your content relevant.
Try out new social features
To help drive online sales, take advantage of new social commerce features. Use Instagram Shops to tag your shoppable products, or give access to influencers to tag your shoppable items in their posts. Customers will be able to make purchases without having to leave the app. A seamless and friction-free shopping experience may increase your brand’s revenue, especially during a busy sale period.
To drive mass brand awareness and social engagement, try holding a virtual Easter event. Live streams and virtual challenges can get customers involved, no matter where they are in the world. During lockdown last year, Disney Backstage Collection held their first virtual Easter egg hunt. To win a 3-month subscription, fans were to be the first to comment on the hidden storytelling details woven into three exclusive Disney Backstage Collection T-shirts on @ShopDisney’s Instagram post.
Level up your content game
Like any holiday, you can expect social feeds are going to be maxed out with Easter deals, offers, and sales. You won’t be the only brand competing for your customer’s attention – especially if you’re a confectionery brand.
There are two steps to tackling this. Firstly, focus on quality. With increased competition, only the most beautiful and innovative content will cut through and reach your customers. Why not try briefing in some creators who can deliver cinemagraphs and video, as well as images, to help your content stand out.
Secondly, make sure the right people are seeing that influencer content by boosting it. Boosting organic influencer content keeps the story coming from the creator, while precisely targeting and engaging a wider portion of your customer base, even if they don’t follow the creator who originally shared the content. Boosting also gives you the ability to drive people to a secondary landing page, such as a website or e-commerce site – driving further seasonal sales.
