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seasonal marketing: 6 top tips for amplifying your marketplace sales all year round

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

You have great products, shoppers are finding them online and your marketing content for each one looks sharp and reads beautifully. Job done? Not quite. If you want to make the most of consumers’ shopping habits all year round, you should embark on a seasonal marketing strategy.

Purchasing habits often change in tandem with specific holidays, events and activities that consumers participate in during different times of the year. As consumer behaviour changes, there are huge opportunities for businesses to tap into this seasonal behaviour and maximise sales, whichever marketplace you’re selling on, and whichever industry you’re in.

It is estimated that retailers are able to increase their customer base by 30-50% during the different seasons by investing in the right marketing strategies.

1. choose the right opportunities for your brand

With so many seasonal opportunities available throughout the year, it can be tempting to try to take advantage of them all. But this is not necessarily a time to give in to your fear of missing out.

If you’re going to put considerable time and money into seasonal advertising strategies and marketing content, take a look at the whole calendar and carefully select the events and seasons that correlate best with your brand.

Offers and promotions can, of course, be tenuously linked to almost any event throughout the year, but whether think about whether or not this approach really strikes a chord with your target market, or risks coming across as desperate.

2. plan ahead

Consumers often plan purchases in advance of seasonal events, and marketing campaigns should also be planned ahead in order to build momentum in the lead up to each event. A last-minute campaign is unlikely to be anywhere near as successful as one that has been given the care and attention it deserves!

Give careful consideration to the lead time on any seasonal marketing updates you’d like to implement. Preparing new content and advertising takes time to get right, and it’s worth factoring in a troubleshooting buffer to allow for any potential delays to your new products or updated content going live.

It’s also vital to align your marketing campaign with your levels of stock — can you cope with the increased demand that your marketing campaign will hopefully stimulate? The last thing you want is to leave consumers feeling flat after you’ve successfully enticed them to your product listings with great marketing!

3. allocate a suitable budget

Creating an effective seasonal marketing campaign that does justice to your brand  demands investment and careful budgeting. Increase your advertising budget to maximise discoverability during peak shopping periods and to ensure you don’t run out of ad spend during the event upon which you’re basing your seasonal marketing strategy!

Consider the costs of other paid marketing like Amazon DSP (demand-side platform) to increase your products’ visibility, looking at a different range of on-platform ads options and promotions. Amazon DSP enables advertisers to buy display and video ads, reaching relevant audiences across all Amazon platforms, as well as third party sites and apps.

4. keep on top of search trends

Consumers tend to leave clues about what they’re interested in at different times of the year based on their search habits. Use tools such as Google Trends (this one is free!) to see when and how consumers use seasonal search terms.

marketplace amp can go one step further, conducting market audits and keyword research with specialist research tools and product analysis to establish new customer trends and review the best opportunities.

Once you’ve identified which search terms you want your products to be found with, it’s time to undertake effective listing optimisation and PPC (pay per click) campaign delivery, driving more traffic to your brand and securing maximum exposure!

5. follow industry insights

Whatever product sector you’re in, there will be plenty of industry reports, newsletters and blogs available to help both your product development and marketing strategies stay ahead of the curve.

In addition to this, it’s important to keep up to date with the latest marketing functionality of whichever marketplaces you trade on. For example, Amazon offers a range of video advertising options with ever-changing creative tools that can be tailored to your seasonal marketing requirements.

6. reuse or fine tune existing content

Most brands optimise their marketplace product listings with striking, high-resolution imagery and engaging copywriting — if you haven’t done this yet, you really should!

Seasonal marketing doesn’t necessarily call for wholesale changes to you content, and a few well-placed alterations can make all the difference when it comes to tapping into the hearts and minds of your target audience.

Visual and written content that’s tailored for seasonal shopping events and shifts in consumer buying trends improves user experience (UX) — essentially the entire customer journey — by increasing the relevancy of your brand and products all year round.

If you have more than one option available for your content refresh and you’re not sure which is best, consider split testing two of them (A/B) over a specific period and gauge the success of each. Carefully document your results and learn from them — identifying both the strengths and weaknesses to address for future campaigns.

how can we help?

Successful seasonal marketing requires excellent timing, content, and campaign execution in order to achieve maximum impact. Get in touch with marketplace amp to find out how our experienced team can amplify your sales.


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