Effective Seasonal Marketing.
As marketers, we know we are well into the festive period. Planning early ensures your efforts throughout the marketing funnel are working hard and effectively to drive the most return possible.
So today, we have pulled together insights from our Digital PR, SEO and PPC experts. This expert insight will help guide and advise you on capitalising on the festive season.
Digital PR
Christmas is notoriously tricky to get coverage because many brands compete to get their stories in the press. As tough as it might be, there are some things we need to bear in mind to help make that cut-through a little easier. This can support your broader marketing efforts in what is usually the most lucrative quarter of the year.
Know your brand
Knowing who you are and what you can speak about with authority is essential. For example, what subjects have your competitors talked about? And furthermore, what has been successful? Both points are great places to begin in order to know what you can do better. You are essentially asking yourself, what can I offer the media that is authentic, interesting, and unique?
Keep it evergreen
There is no harm in bringing back your old ideas or content. However, they need to be made relevant for the present day. Also, by re-using and tweaking past landing pages, you can maintain and drive further authority to that page from active outreach and backlinks.
Using data
Using your data or commissioning a survey is a great way to broaden your media list. By broadening your list you can gain a greater chance of cut-through with unique and original data and angles. Also, having that data set and research allows you to be reactive when specific stories break in the media. If you incline to contribute to the conversation, you can reactively pitch that to journalists.
Seasonal vs Festive
It’s essential to understand that not everyone will be interested in Christmas-related content. A great tip is positioning your campaign messaging as festive rather than Christmas. Also, not hinging your campaign on one day but a whole season, you can get longevity from your campaign and make it work harder for longer.
From an SEO perspective, there may be broader ‘festive’ keywords to target as part of your strategy, which will help drive traffic and visibility.
SEO Seasonal Marketing.
It would be best to consider SEO a long-term strategy, and you should factor SEO seasonality optimisation into your overall search engine strategies. Optimising your website when demand is high is essential to maximise organic opportunities. But at the same time, have you thought about the benefits of optimising for the seasonal period? And in addition, the impact can it have on your organic search performance during quieter periods?
Why is seasonal SEO important?
Like traditional SEO, seasonal SEO optimises your products and services for event-based or time-based periods such as Christmas and Valentine’s Day. The ultimate goal of optimising your pages during seasonal months, such as the festive period, is to drive conversions during peak purchasing times.
Here are some benefits of seasonal SEO:
- Broadens your keyword landscape, meaning you will not only rank for your target keywords but also rank for seasonal terms
- Helps tap into new users during peak times which helps with brand awareness
- During peak seasonal periods, cost-per-click is usually high, meaning you can utilise high CPC terms through organic search.
- Keeping your seasonal product/service pages live throughout the year helps build authority.
Tips on how to plan your seasonal SEO strategy
- Keyword research – plan your seasonal pages well in advance, ensure to do your keyword research and compile a list of seasonal keywords to target via your pages.
- Create seasonal pages – having dedicated pages helps build authority and is excellent for driving new and existing customers down the sales funnel.
“The PHA Group SEO team tip: “many brands delete a page or add a 301 redirect to a seasonal page, diluting authority for next year’s event-based period. Remove your seasonal pages from the navigation menu; however, do not redirect or delete these pages; keep them live to help build authority and refresh them with new content next year. This refresh helps build a page’s longevity and organic presence.”
- Seasonal content – ensure your seasonal content is ready two months in advance so that Google has time to crawl and index your content. It is also important to refresh your existing seasonal content with fresh trends to maximise your content’s longevity.
- Check your page load speed and technical health – ensure your page is loading quickly and there aren’t any technical issues hindering performance.
- Backlink planning – ensure you have planned your backlink acquisition which helps amplify your content.
Paid Search Seasonal Marketing.
Getting your seasonal activity prepped well before the anticipated peak or uplift is vital.
Mechanically it’s helpful to have seasonal campaigns established in advance of the seasonal uplift, as 30-day historic CTR is a component of ad rank (the measure that determines how much you pay for a click and where on the page you display). You’d ideally want the entire 30-day historic range in advance of the uplift, so would setting activity live at least 30 days before the expected kick-off of the seasonal uplift.
Additionally, having time to test and learn in terms of bids, ad copy and negative keywords will put your campaign in a more advantageous position than someone who waits until the seasonal uplift starts to go live.
From a market share point of view, if users are searching for your seasonal terms, then there is interest that warrants your ad showing; if you don’t, someone else will do. It’s always worth noting that how paid search works are that how much you pay (assuming that budgets are sufficient) is determined primarily by the volume of searchers.
If you’re interested in finding out more about our Organic and Paid seasonal marketing, get in touch today to find out more.
