The winter can be a tricky time to navigate marketing due to all of the holidays and the colder weather. There are many different holidays to celebrate including Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and Valentine’s Day, so it can be difficult to decide what kind of campaigns you want to run and whether or not you should include every holiday. We wanted to discuss two potential strategies for tackling the colder months!
The overall goal is to inspire consumers to become your loyal customers, so using old strategies like “New Year, New Me” won’t cut it anymore. We recommend one of two things: either fully embracing the winter and using it to your advantage or avoiding using winter entirely and focusing on the warm weather that lies ahead.
When taking the full winter strategy, you want to market directly towards the audience who enjoys the cold, snow, or homebody lifestyle. The goal is to create the ideal winter wonderland that they can enjoy from the warmth of their own homes. The “snowed in” approach is also a great way to appeal to your users. Reading, movie binging, baking, board games, and fuzzy pajamas are just a few great ideas for enjoying the snow from inside.
You could also target the adventure lovers and capitalize on skiing, ice skating, tubing, or other winter activities that make the cold a fun place to be! Regardless of whether or not you choose to take the indoors or outdoors approach to the cold, you want to invoke an emotional response from the consumer, once you appeal to their emotions, your success will come naturally.
On the other side, if you know the cold won’t appeal to your target audience, you can use your winter platform to prepare your users for the warm weather that is approaching in the spring. This is easy for some industries including travel or apparel because they are always planning for the future! Take the time in the later winter months to talk about new specials or promotions you will be running when the weather gets warmer, so your audience has something to look forward to! By doing this, you are still capturing their attention while avoiding the stereotypical winter topics.
A good example would be swimsuits in the wintertime. Brands are always releasing their swimsuits months before it is ever warm enough to swim because it piques the user’s interest and causes them to buy in preparation for the season that is next. You want to target your audience, for whatever you are selling, to always be moving forward, or thinking about what they will want in the future. This allows you to beat the competition that might be one step behind you.
Whether you decide to settle into the winter topics or use topics that plan ahead for the next season, you should always keep your audience captivated and on their toes. If you are lost in the “winter storm” of digital marketing, Socially Posting can help you out! We offer many different styles of content creation and marketing automation that can appeal directly to your target audience. Set up an appointment with us to discuss your marketing challenges and how we can alleviate them here: https://calendly.com/madison-6686/30min