Seasonality and Marketing Your Brand Online
Depending on the nature of your business, seasonality could absolutely impact how your brand will be presented online. For some businesses, such as eCommerce-based companies, the seasonality is obvious. Toy manufacturers clearly perform better around major holidays like Christmas, companies selling sporting goods like camping equipment do better in the warmer months, and winter coat manufacturers will sell more good when it is cold out.
With B2B businesses, the seasonality may not be as obvious, but it does still exist. It depends on the type of business you have. Here’s a look at seasonality and its impact on digital marketing:
Identifying Trends
When you first begin a digital marketing campaign, you may not have enough data to identify trends related to seasonality, especially if your trends are on the subtle side. As mentioned above, the trends will be more obvious with eCommerce businesses. However, you can check to see if any seasonal trends exist no matter what kind of business you have if you have enough data to observe.
For example, let’s say you are running a search engine optimization campaign and your traffic dips between the months of June and August. If you haven’t been tracking your data, you may not know if there is a trend or not. However, if you can look back several years, you may notice that each year, your traffic dips between these months and then goes back up. You have just spotted a seasonal trend!
Don’t Be Reactive
What happens when you notice your traffic dipping? Do you react and try to artificially make the traffic go back up in order to keep your numbers steady? When it comes to seasonal trends, trying to boost the traffic when you spot them may not do any good.
Chances are pretty good that if you did pump extra resources into your marketing during a seasonal low, it would be a waste because your audience may not be ready to accept your business’s message. You might be better off saving your resources to align for when your audience will be responsive to your offer.
Following Seasonality in Your Marketing
Let’s say you’ve identified some important seasonal trends, even if they’re subtle. These could still be important and should factor into your yearly marketing plan. For example, you may notice that you get more leads at a certain time of year. Does this spike in leads correlate to a seasonal trend? If it does, this can help you formulate a plan that will enable you to bring in even more leads in the coming year. You wouldn’t want to pump too much money into lead generation during a time when your traffic is experiencing a dip.
If you have a long sales cycle, it may be harder to identify trends. In some cases, the business may not have a seasonal trend. You will only really know if this is the case for your company if you are able to look at the data.
Categorized in: Digital Marketing
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