The Top Four Effective Ways to Market Your Site Seasonally

July Fourth has now passed, and it is time to reflect on your seasonal sales and marketing strategies to help bring your site to its full sales potential in any holiday season. A few things to consider are what went right, what went wrong and how you can improve sales for your next seasonal holiday. It is never too late to promote your site with seasonal design and special discounts, spotlight your top products, and advertise with social media. The four top tips below will help you choose what is right for your site this holiday weekend:
#1. Use Seasonal Color Effectively: Establishing the colors and fonts that celebrate your site, as well as the season, is a balance that can be hard to achieve. Some of the first things to consider when having seasonal themes are how effective will your audience perceive your advertising techniques. Deciding to use the seasonal colors in your site is not a long term technique, but it will have a lasting effect if done too hastily. Color forces us to see both shape and form, so do not compromise your brand for a seasonal color palette; rather, it is better to complement it. Make sure that the colors you use symbolize and complement your site around the messages you are trying to portray.
For example, these 3 colors are the traditional colors of the season

Now with added complementary colors:

Now look at the color values:

Color value and saturation is something to consider when choosing seasonal colors or imagery. Use tools such as imgaecolorpicker.com and color-hex.com, two great sites to explore this Fourth if you are considering a seasonal palette. Your audience will appreciate your design theory if they sense the complementary use of the colors in the design of your site.
#2. Using Seasonal Discounts: Bringing in and promoting seasonal discounts provides a great opportunity for marketing your site and attracting more traffic to your site. Some considerations are:

• Special Rebates
  • Incentivize a loyalty program by offering special deals for new or returning clients. This way your loyal clients will feel appreciated and new clients welcomed to your brand.
• Email Deals
  • Offer promotional deals from a mailing list that you have created. Incentivize email-only promotion codes for your site with special discounts or access to exclusive content that would be unique for the season, e.g. concert ticket drawing, free monthly service fee waived, etc.

#3. Spotlight your Top Products: This is the perfect opportunity to highlight your top products. Showcasing your site this holiday weekend is the perfect opportunity to be recognized by its brand message and imagery, and to create a lasting first impression for new clients. This is a good time of the year to reflect on your marketing strategies, how well your predictions for the third and fourth quarter will be and – if applicable – adapt to the changing market quickly. Here are a few ideas on how to really push your top products and services this holiday:

• Keep track of your SEO
  • Consider adding key seasonal phrases to your site so people see your site on the top search engines. This may also be a good time to evaluate the SEO tools and strategies. Using WordPress Plugins such as Yoast SEO by using the multiple focus keywords are an easy way to find out if your content matches the purpose of your keyword selection. An example of these phrases for the 4th of July would be “July Fourth Deal”, “Holiday Event”, “Fourth of July”, etc.
• Is your web layout highlighting your products?
  • Adapting this  could be as easy and changing the size or your photos or changing your font.
• Are your top products bringing customers to your site?
  • Knowing what your market is can be a tricky task. This should be your number one priority when considering what products to highlight this holiday season.

#4. Social Media: At this time of year, Social Media can bring promising opportunities to your site. Special promotions will confirm to your audience that your brand is much more than just a website. Get involved in your community this holiday weekend –  there is no better time of the year to take advantage of social media. According to socialmediatoday.com, people spent on average 35 minutes a day on Facebook and 25 minutes a day on Snapchat. Holidays may slow traffic on your site, but social media traffic on mobile devices is typically higher when customers are out of the office. Taking advantage of social media could help make up the sales loss over long weekends.
Here are some considerations around what social media can do for your site:

• Does the social media platform bring your site significant traffic or is it failing your expectations?
  • This could be as easy as checking your Google or Facebook analytics. Being proactive with social media tools can help you gauge whether your promotion is greatly benefiting your site, or whether there is any budget being spent that is not providing any return on investment. In this case a rethink of the marketing strategy would be advised.
• Do you have a social media department that is up to date with what is going on in social trends, or is your site falling stagnate using old marketing tactics that cost you both time and money?