Every year, new themes, trends and events present opportunity for brands that know how to capitalize upon them. While some of these dynamics are one-time events that may rely upon current trends, many are recurring seasonal themes that appear every single year. Various forms of seasonal marketing are important to a wide variety of niches and industries that wish to make optimal levels of profit and generate ample attention throughout various parts of the year.

To be effective at seasonal marketing, half of the battle is being prepared. To help our readers understand what seasonal marketing preparation entails, we’ll be reviewing what you should consider in advance to make this form of marketing as potent as possible.

Review Past Seasons

Establishing a baseline of past performance is the first step in preparing for future seasonal marketing efforts. Even if no prior seasonal marketing focus existed, evaluating various metrics such as sales, profits, click-through rates, conversions and other important criteria can help you determine whether or not you were pinging users adequately during these periods.

Regardless of the results, there is always room for improvement. A lack of proper performance – or an over-performance for that matter – can help guide future seasonal marketing efforts. But you won’t know what’s what if you don’t look back and do your research! Take what works well from previous relevant seasons and build upon that to produce even better results in the future.

Begin Building Content

To adequately appeal to various seasonal trends, you’ll need a plethora of content. Unfortunately, your brand may also need to continue with its usual focus, however generalized, throughout this period. Being prepared means having as much content as possible for seasonal marketing ready to go before and during the big seasonal push.

For recurring seasonal events, you’ll likely already have a broad idea of what types of content marketing will be necessary. In some specific cases (such as hot products for the holiday season), you may not yet know exactly which options will be ideal to include. However and even in these cases, building the framework for these content offerings can be rather easily done months in advance.

Examine the Competition

As important as it is to evaluate what you accomplished in past seasonal cycles, seeing what your competitors did is even more important! Especially if your competitors did better than you or were focused on seasonal trends when you were not, inspecting their behaviors and performance can further guide preparation for future seasonal marketing plans.

You can easily see which keywords your competitors are ranking for and have targeted in recent history, as can you determine which websites and platforms are predominantly responsible for pushing traffic to your competitors’ seasonal pages. By unveiling how effectively your competitors are pinging users with seasonal content, you can learn from their efforts and play catch-up quite quickly.

Seasonal search, email and social media marketing are all highly competitive dynamics – but they aren’t difficult to understand. By uncovering your own past seasonal performance, analyzing the competition’s performance and tactics, and building seasonal content in advance, there is no reason why you should be caught flat-footed the next time a big seasonal opportunity emerges.