In the same way that most people start thinking about buying presents for birthdays and holidays and clothing for hot or cold weather just a few weeks before they need them, many businesses think about marketing for holidays and seasons just a short while before it needs to happen. The social media posts go up the day before Valentine’s Day, and the Christmas or Hannukah sale gets announced mere days before the holiday starts. The back-to-school campaign might even launch after school has already started!

None of this is really “laziness.” It’s just that running a business doesn’t leave a lot of room to think three months ahead about what your marketing should be doing at that point. But seasonal and holiday marketing is one of the few areas where timing genuinely makes or breaks the results, and getting ahead of it can change everything.

That’s why we’re dropping this blog in the middle of summer; to give you time to plan ahead for the upcoming fall and winter seasons and holidays!

Two Types of Seasonal Marketing

Before getting into strategy, it helps to understand that the idea of seasonal marketing covers two different but intrinsically related ideas.

The first is calendar holiday marketing. Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hannukah, New Year’s, and so on. These are the holidays that show up on every calendar and cause predictable consumer behavior and trends every year. People are ready to spend money for these events. The job of your marketing is to show up with just the right message at just the right moment.

The second is season-based marketing. This isn’t as much about specific dates as it is about the rhythms that run our lives, both personally and in a business sense. Back to school, tax season, summer vacations and activities, ski season, and all those types of things. These cycles repeat every year, they’re predictable, and a lot of businesses don’t realize how dramatically and effectively they can build their marketing plans around them. Both types of marketing matter, but they require somewhat different approaches.

Holiday Marketing: Timing Is Key

The mistake businesses make with holiday marketing isn’t that they skip it, but rather that they start too late. By the time some businesses are thinking about putting together a holiday campaign, their customers have already made up their minds. Holiday shoppers start browsing weeks before they buy, so the businesses that show up before the holiday ads inundate the airwaves and the internet are the ones that get remembered when it’s time to spend that money.

A good rule of thumb is to start planning at least six to eight weeks before the holiday, and to start running your campaigns four to six weeks out. That gives you time to build awareness before your competitors are all scrambling for attention. This means that when the holiday arrives, your business is already familiar instead of just another spammy holiday message in a very crowded inbox.

The other big mistake is treating every holiday the same. Not every holiday is relevant to every business, and a business that tries to have a promotion for every single date on the calendar can look desperate. Pick the holidays that make genuine sense for your business and your customers and do them well. A Valentine’s Day campaign for a florist should be top-notch. They probably don’t need to spend time planning a campaign for Flag Day.

The Mother’s Day post we wrote recently is a good example of approaching holiday marketing with real thought. It’s important to recognize that the holiday carries emotional complexity for many customers, and businesses which acknowledge that will build stronger relationships than ones blasting generic promotions anywhere and everywhere. This same principle applies across all holidays. Emotional intelligence in holiday marketing can be a real differentiator for your business if approached thoughtfully.

The Hidden Opportunity of Season-Based Marketing

Calendar holidays might seem to get all the attention, but smart season-based marketing can create some truly enormous opportunities for small businesses.

Consider a pool, patio, and spa company. Their business model has a natural seasonal rhythm that is entirely predictable, as the first warm weekends of spring trigger homeowners into thinking about their backyard and summer plans. Summer is peak sales season for pools and outdoor furniture, and late summer and early fall are prime time for hot tub and spa purchases with their cooler evenings. Winter is quieter for this type of company, but it’s a great time to run off-season promotions, push gift cards, and stay visible for the customers who are planning spring projects, or facilities who need to plan their maintenance budget for the upcoming year.

These are all seasonal windows that have specific marketing opportunities attached to them. Every one of those opportunities can be planned for months in advance, because they happen every year.

Businesses that are effective at capturing these marketing moments are the ones that think about them before they arrive. When the first warm weekend of spring arrives and homeowners start thinking about their pools and patios, the company whose email showed with a sale and spring opening checklist just a week ago is already in their mind. The company that waits until the last minute to try and catch those sales with a late campaign is going to be left behind.

Seasonal Marketing Calendars

A practical tool businesses can create to improve their seasonal marketing is a simple calendar created at the start of each year.

The first step is to map out the calendar holidays that are relevant to your business. It’s unlikely all of them will make sense, so just choose the ones where a promotion or campaign fits your customer base. Then look at your previous seasonal business cycles. When do things get busy, when do they slow down, and when do your customers start thinking about the products you sell or the services you provide?

Once you have these things figured out, work backwards to plan. A campaign that needs to go out at the beginning or middle of November should be planned in August, written in September, and scheduled in October. Those ads might seem like a long way out until it’s October and you realize you haven’t started yet!

Your calendar doesn’t need to be complicated. Just a simple spreadsheet with key dates, ideas, and deadlines can help to prevent a scramble that produces last-minute marketing that doesn’t really produce any results.

Seasonal Campaigns

A seasonal campaign doesn’t require the same type of full production. Often an effective seasonal campaign involves just a few coordinated pieces. Send an email or newsletter, a few social posts, and possibly a website update or landing page if it’s a particularly important season for your business.

What makes this simpler plan work is its coordination. All the pieces should feel like they belong together. They should have the same message, same visual elements, and a similar call to action. A social media post that promotes a spring sale but leads to a website that doesn’t mention or also promote the sale is a broken experience, and that can cost conversions.

The message itself should be about what customers are feeling and thinking at that moment. In spring, a pool company’s customer probably isn’t thinking about prices quite yet. They’re likely just starting to think about evenings in the backyard and summer gatherings with family and friends. The marketing that meets them in that space should speak to those feeling before it pitches products. This can be much more effective than simply leading with discounts, which might just pull them out of the moment.