Leveraging Seasonal Peaks: Tips To Boost Your Brand
Seasonal peaks, what are they?
What is classed as Seasonal Peak?
Seasonal peaks can come in many ways, from events to promotional offers, these are all periods of time where you can build awareness for your business and see an uplift in traffic.
Depending on what your company offers and who its target audience is determines when your seasonal peak is. Many businesses will find Q4 is the biggest peak for the year as there are many sale periods such as Christmas & black Friday. This is the time where businesses can increase their awareness and gain customer loyalty.
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Discovering Your Seasonal Peak: A Guide to Understanding When You're at Your Best
Seasonal peaks are unique to every business. With multiple audiences and goals it can be difficult to figure out when your peak is. Whilst Q4 is the most popular period due to the promotional offer season, some businesses may find this doesn’t apply to others.
The main way you can discover your seasonal peak is through looking into your previous year’s performance. When did you find a noticeable uplift? Did you notice more search volume and purchasing demand? Once doing so you can create a budget plan to ensure you are allocating your ad spend to the correct period. Not only is this cost effective, but this will also benefit your overall performance for the year.
Effective Tips for Enhancing Your Top Selling Products
A key tip to enhance your best-selling products is through splitting out Performance Max (pMax) campaigns by bestsellers. This campaign type increases leads as well as conversions with your choice of budgets and bids across more Googles channels.?
Having a campaign 100% goal-orientated, you are choosing what you are hoping to gain performance wise from these campaigns. Not only will it improve the awareness of the business you will start to see results faster.
By splitting your pMax campaign, you are ensuring that within one campaign, the bestsellers are finding new audience segments that you may not have discovered yet leading to a higher ROAS. During peak season this is a key strategy you want to use as you are reaching a much broader audience that are likely to lead to conversions
Looking at this example of a pMax campaign, it is clear from the ROAS, the clicks that have led to conversions have had an extremely positive impact on the revenue from hitting a wider audience that could be more interested in purchasing within one singular campaign.
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What is Seasonality Bid Adjustments and how is it beneficial??????????
Seasonality Bid Adjustments is a key way to temporarily guide smart bidding to increase or decrease your bids. This is a proactive way to bid higher for a sale period or event rather than waiting for smart bidding to learn you are running a sale.
?The best way to set your desired CPC increase is to base it from your equivalent sale period results (within the last 12 months) and evaluate how much CPC has increased, was it a profitable ROAS? Following this you should review your impression share and determine whether you were maximising exposure for your sale. This is an efficient way to increase your performance and make sure you’re making the most of your peak season.
As you can see from this table, this is a short-term efficient way to increase your conversion rate for your seasonal peak. This is a beneficial strategy for businesses as they can ensure they are receiving the best performance
How to create a seasonal peaks calendar?
Time to plan your seasonal peak calendar!?
Following these few steps will ensure perfect time management as well as effective and consistent strategies.
Looking into this calendar, you can gain some inspiration as to what days come up during your seasonal peaks and review if any are relevant that could potentially help during the peak.?
If we take earth day as an example, this could be a really useful day to promote your business if summer is a seasonal peak. Paying attention to days like these could be really useful as a lot of these are days where people could be online to shop or find businesses who care about similar things to their customers.
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Seasonal peaks you should consider using in your marketing?
Ecommerce businesses should take all sale periods as a time where they will have a peak in performance and consider using this as their prime time to market for their business, particularly Q4 as not only is there Black Friday, but Christmas and Boxing Day Sales.
Looking into Google Trends, sales were up in the top 10 for search topics. This shows that companies having sale periods will have a peak in performance as it is the time to promote your business and what you have to offer. With the cost of living crisis, people are particularly looking for sales, market your sale as much as possible before people click to ensure higher quality traffic
If we look into companies like Lush for example, their sale period for boxing day had a +308% search increase meaning this could be their “main'' seasonal peak due to it being their only sale period of the year.
Effectively this is a good marketing strategy as they can really boost their campaign for the sale period as it's a rare occasion.
They will see an extreme spike in sales as it is only once a year. Following this they don’t overlap special events, e.g. mothers day, valentines day and easter are all close together however they take note of long in advance they want to promote their limited edition products to prevent any overlapping of ads and campaigns
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Seasonal peaks Marketing Examples?
Looking into one of our outdoor living clients, the seasonal peak period is more unique. Their main peak is summer & spring (Q2/Q3) rather than Q4. Purchasing demand and search volume is at its highest during summer for their products.
Looking into some of the results we gained from 2022
As you can see the performance from our peak seasons for this client has had an extremely positive result for the year with our strategies we have used.
Preparing your SEO for seasonal peaks?
While its great to leverage seasonal peaks in your paid and social media advertising, you must consider how your SEO and content strategy may or may not be supporting seasonal peaks.?
SEO and content have a slightly different approach for seasonal peak planning. As it can take a while to rank for certain terms, we advise always having seasonal landing pages live. You can remove them from the main menu navigation, but keep the pages live, filled with content and indexed.?
If you turn your Valentine’s Day sale page off once the event is over, you’ll lose rankings and traffic. Instead, keep it live on your site but don’t link to it. Have it discoverable in Google search to keep it’s value when not in use. When the offers return, link to it from a banner, main menu navigation etc. This way you won’t have to claw your way back up the rankings every year for your main events!
Another closely related tip is to get your pages ready and live well ahead of time.?
If you’re offering Black Friday deals for the first time ever, get the page live ASAP. It can take a while to rank, especially for competitive offer terms. So having this page ready to toll is a lifesaver. Build backlinks to it for an added boost of performance.
How Digital PR?can support your seasonal peaks strategy
Utilising Digital PR for seasonal peaks is a strategy that will get you noticed and help increase authority while educating or informing. By achieving coverage in industry relevant and high authority sites you can see uplift in organic traffic and organic rankings closing the gap between yourselves and your competitors.
For example, if your product is a Summer specific product, outreaching as early as February/March will allow time to educate and inform your target audience and build a relationship prior to that purchase. This can be done through campaigns but also thought leadership.?
Thought leadership is a successful way to answer long tail queries while simultaneously building brand awareness, this paired with a content strategy will help to optimise the site but also be used as a knowledge hub for a consumer where all their queries and questions are answered. Monitoring the news cycle and prepping for awareness days is a great start to identify opportunities to react.
So, our final advice to you is to make sure you have a seasonal peaks calendar ready and raring to go, and if you really want it to be a success, make sure it includes paid advertising, SEO, Content and Digital PR.?
Get in contact today if you need support. We offer a range of services from consulting, audits and strategy to full implementation!?
Author: Olivia Keys
With contributions from Max Kinsella and Lauren Field
Great first blog! Well done, Liv ????