Top Ten Fall Marketing Fourth quarter Marketing Tips
Fall and the 4th quarter are coming fast!
To best capture holiday and fall sales you need to make sure your marketing plan is prepared and ready to go well ahead of time.
Every business small and large has been touched in some way by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, but adapting to the altered environment and maintaining as normal as possible operations will keep you ahead of your competitors and put you in a good position entering 2021. Your marketing plan needs take this into account and be modified based on your current operations.
1. Sales and Promotions
There are always numerous occasions to run sales throughout the fall, you should take advantage of them all! Run “ fall sales”, “Black Friday Specials”, “Holiday/Christmas Sales” and “End of the year specials”. The more events you create as part of your brand, the more products you’ll move. Promote these events and tease offers through all your advertising and marketing channels. Develop a set of brand content for each sale and use it across all platforms/channels for each sale. This way each sale will have visually differentiated marketing. IE make all the Black Friday content have a distinctive style then when you switch to Christmas content, again give it a distinctive look. Your audience will better pay attention to the changes in your content.
2. Compelling offers
Too many times we’ve seen brands advertise the hell out of offers that just aren’t that good. Make sure that if you spend the time and money to create sales events and special offers for your brand, that the offers are actually something that will get your audience off the couch or at least off of Netflix to order what you sell! Especially for Black Friday/ End of the Year etc, consumers have strong expectations for offers that are really good. Now keep in mind you don’t have to have great offers on everything you sell, you could use a few items as loss leaders to get people interested in your products or in the store. These items could have limited inventory to prevent excessive losses, but would serve their purpose to create buzz and drive action. Many large firms do this, they’ll advertise a highly discounted LED TV, but then have 3 in stock….. so it does it’s job to get you interested.
3. Sponsorships and Festivals
2020 isn’t the best year for festivals and sponsorships, but fall is a common time for many brands to support local sports teams and have a presence at local festivals. It’s easy to be skeptical of the effectiveness of being a part of local festivals, but anytime you can build an in-person connection between potential customers and your staff, you’ll see positive results. Local sports teams are another great way to do this. Generally these marketing activities cost less than you think, but keep in mind like many things, you’ll get out of them what you put into them. In this case, it’s not always money you are putting in, but your team’s time to make sure employees are at the festivals and events to represent your brand and network. Covid19 has drastically diminished these activities for 2020, so make sure to carefully think through how this will work as the pandemic continues.
4.Inventory planning
If your business sells a physical product be very sure that you have carefully planned your inventory stock and if needed, order additional inventory needed for the holidays well ahead of time. Particularly if you are buying goods from overseas place the order and book transportation as early as possible. Due to coronavirus and unexpected demand, brands are experiencing sometimes extreme delays receiving products from China or other foreign supplier bases. The last thing you want to happen is run out of inventory for a popular product. We’ve seen this happen numerous times, don’t let it be you. One of our clients, Zmodal, provides supply chain services, check them out if you need help! All the marketing in the world can’t fix running out of your top selling product.
5. If you haven’t been leveraging SEO optimization and content, Start now!
It’s never too late to start leveraging SEO content and optimization. If you haven’t put much thought into SEO, you need to now. Make it a priority. It’s a long term move that will realistically take some months to see results from, but it will make a huge difference if done right. You absolutely need to be ranking for relevant search terms and capturing inbound leads; you are leaving sales on the table if you aren’t. This includes many elements, but creating SEO content for your website, making sure your website is properly setup for SEO, search engine profile pages, google maps info, keyword analysis, and backlinks will be a big help to your online brand overtime. Don’t put it off any longer
6. Media Buys and Campaign Monitoring
Early fall is a good time to take a look at how your media spend has been throughout the year and see where you want to place media buys through the holiday season. Media buys can include radio, local broadcast tv, national tv, cable, satellite providers, billboards, print placements in newspapers and magazines, and digital spend. Work with your agency and reps to start looking at what you want to run. Football season ad placement can be a big part of many brands’ advertising plan. Your media buying plan can be as complicated or simple as you make it, but just make sure to have some kind of plan. Take a look at your overall advertising budget, and start breaking down what you think it is working, and what you want to do differently.
7. Make a big deal about holidays
Create as much buzz as you can about your special offers and sales events. Use social media channels, paid media, PR if possible, email lists, anything you can to get your audience excited and looking forward to your offers and sales. Tease offers well ahead of time and include language about the limited time specials. Having a call to action based on a limited time promotion can be an effective strategy to have your audience actually looking forward to your sale.
8. Take a look at your Analytics including Search terms
Early 4th quarter and fall is a good time to check your google analytics and take a deep dive on search terms, CTR on digital campaigns, social media growth rate, email open rates and ACOS on any paid advertising. If something is clearly not working, now is the time to get it fixed before the holiday season is here. That being said, don’t kill a digital campaign too quickly, however if a keyword has been unprofitable for multiple months, consider dropping it from PPC. Volan Media is a top Tennessee provider of SEO and digital marketing auditing services. Commonly we can help to optimize and improve profitability of paid search campaigns through an integrated and data based approach.
9. Plan and Create Content if you can ahead of time
Get a head start on content creation for your fall marketing campaigns. Plan a visual theme for each holiday event that fits your current brand image then start building content from this theme. A lot of times we recommend to start with video content creation as this can be the most time consuming, but can also provide a lot of the assets and images needed for web ads, email, print, social media etc. Often using video as the foundation can yield great results as many times you can pull other types of content from the video content. Video also yields 40-60% higher CTR than static images for digital ads, email marketing with integrated content, and social media content. Videos can be more expensive to make, but can be pretty widely used once the investment is made. Video content also can heavily increase your ROI on media buy which results is more efficient and profitable campaign.
10. Repeat Customers will Buy
Be sure to consider repeat customers with your offers and marketing plan. Repeat customers can represent up to 80% of sales and revenue, so make sure they aren’t forgotten. Your list of current and previous customers should be segmented and receive specialized email content. This gives you a direct line to your repeat customers and allows you to effectively market new offers and specials to them quickly and easily.
There are just a few of the key marketing considerations you should be making as fall approaches. Get your marketing plan going, it doesn’t have to be perfect the first time, better to have a rough plan that is refined over time than to hold off marketing until something is perfected. Also, you need to be constantly using a small portion of your marketing budget to try experiment with different types of offers, types of content, new marketing channels etc. Many times what you think wouldn’t work, might work well and be a profitable channel. A/B testing is also a necessity for all digital and email marketing. Constant refinement and analysis is key to building a highly profitable digital program.
Volan Media provides comprehensive marketing services and is a top Knoxville Tennessee video production company, top Knoxville Tennessee website agency and top Knoxville Tennessee advertising agency. We’ve worked with clients large and small both locally and abroad to create marketing content and plans that create action. Give us a shout if we can help!
