How to Adjust Your Ads for Seasonality

Understanding Seasonal Consumer Behaviour

To create impactful seasonal campaigns, it's crucial to understand the underlying factors that influence consumer behaviour during different seasons. Elements such as weather, holidays, and cultural events significantly impact people's needs, desires, and purchasing habits. By identifying these seasonal shifts, marketers can craft ads that resonate with their target audience.

During different seasons, your audience's needs, desires, and purchasing habits change. To effectively target your audience, it's crucial to understand these seasonal shifts and craft your ads accordingly.

On top of this, we also need a thorough understanding of our client's seasonal product/service demand, as this can play an enormous role in allocating budget spend throughout the year. 

Thoroughly understanding our client's industry verticals is key to our success at Reflect, consider Hopes Grove Nurseries for example, a client we have been working with for years now. A long-term working relationship like this not only allows us to develop a deep and thorough understanding of the Hedging Products and Industry but also allows us to plan our ad activity with exceptional precision. We pace our monthly budget for Google Search, Shopping and Programmatic activity perfectly in line with our developed understanding of the audience we’re targeting & demand. 

Alongside budget spend, we also push and pull our key campaigns for products, such as Bare Root plants; through Summer we completely stop any activity for Bare Root products, then in Autumn restart the activity to become a key campaign over the next 6 months. 

Behavioural Nudges and Persuasion Techniques

Behavioural nudges are subtle cues that influence people's decision-making processes without restricting their choices. By incorporating these techniques into your seasonal ads, you can encourage potential customers to take specific actions. Let's explore some effective behavioural nudges we consistently use:

• Scarcity: Creating a sense of urgency can spur immediate action. Emphasise limited-time offers or exclusive seasonal deals using phrases like "Limited stock available!" or "Offer ends soon!" to motivate customers to make a purchase.
• Social Proof: People are more likely to trust and engage with a brand when they see others doing the same. We can do this by showcasing customer testimonials, ratings, or user-generated content related to the season to build trust and validate your products or services. On top of this, incorporating seasonal trends, such as time of year or holidays to further resonate with audiences. 
• Anchoring: Pricing strategies that anchor your seasonal offers against higher regular prices can make them appear more enticing. For example, "Save 50% off the original price!" This technique creates a perception of value and encourages customers to take advantage of the seasonal offer.

Integrating nudges like the ones above into our seasonality is key to increasing sales and conversions throughout the year; we’re also able to further resonate with audiences, be more relevant with the messaging and stand out from the crowd. 

EAST Framework: Making Behaviour Easy

The EAST framework, developed by the Behavioural Insights Team, simplifies the process of influencing behaviour. By aligning your seasonal ads with the framework's principles, you can enhance their effectiveness. Let's break down each element of the EAST framework:

Easy

Ensure that your ads are easily understandable and require minimal effort from the audience. Use clear and concise language, visually appealing imagery, and straightforward calls to action. Make it effortless for customers to engage with your seasonal offerings.

Attractive

Capture attention and create an emotional connection with your audience by making your ads visually appealing. Incorporate seasonal elements, holiday ad themes & messaging, vibrant colours, and cheerful imagery that resonate with the target audience. This approach increases engagement and enhances the overall impact of your ads.

Social

Leverage the power of social influence by highlighting how others engage with your brand during the season. Incorporate social media engagement prompts, hashtags, or challenges to encourage sharing and participation. This fosters a sense of community and amplifies the reach of your seasonal campaigns. Using Social influence also presents us with a huge opportunity to leverage seasonality, we can consider the weather, yearly spending habits of our audience and common denominators of the market to make our ads more impactful and meaningful to the viewers.  

Timely 

Aligning ad campaigns with ads during the key times for responses or conversions, alongside relevant seasonal events, holidays, or cultural moments. This also ensures that our messaging resonates with the target audience and prompts immediate action. By staying up-to-date with the latest seasonal trends and occasions, we can capitalise on opportunities throughout the year. By considering major buying events, such as Black Friday, Christmas, and Easter, we’re able to not only amend our messaging and creatives to these events but plan ahead with our budget allocation, sales tactics and campaign targeting.

The Working Memory Model: Maximising Retention

The working memory model suggests that people can only process a limited amount of information in their short-term memory. To maximise the retention of your seasonal ads, consider the following principles:

Simplicity 

Present key information simply and memorably. Avoid overwhelming your audience with excessive details or complicated messaging. Use concise and impactful statements that clearly communicate the value of your seasonal offerings.

Repetition 

Reinforce your messaging through repetition across various platforms. Ensure that key elements such as your brand, seasonal offers, and calls to action are consistently and prominently featured. Repetition strengthens memory retention and increases the likelihood of conversion.

Visual Cues 

Utilise visually appealing images, videos, or infographics that represent the season and evoke positive emotions. Visual cues aid in memory retention and enhance the overall impact of your ads. Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words, and an eye-catching image can leave a lasting impression on your audience. Studies have also shown social media users' cognitive load is reduced when they view images and their gaze will divert to faces in ads first, so try making people present in ads look towards the copy or text in the ad. 

Aligning with the Marketing Funnel

Now all these Behavioural Psychology techniques and strategies that we use for our Seasonal Ads are great, but we also need to consider how to effectively guide potential customers through the marketing funnel to create the most effective strategies:

Awareness 

Attract attention and generate interest in your seasonal offerings by creating engaging ad creatives across Google Search and Display ads, Meta, LinkedIn, and TikTok. Incorporate playful and cheery tones to captivate your audience from the outset.

Consideration 

Provide compelling reasons why your seasonal offerings are superior to others. Leverage the behavioural nudges discussed above, social proof, and persuasive messaging to establish credibility and build trust with your audience. Highlight the unique value and benefits of your products or services during the season.

Conversion 

Make it easy for customers to take action. Ensure that your ads lead to relevant landing pages with straightforward purchase options or clear steps to access your seasonal promotions. Streamline the conversion process to minimise friction and maximise the chances of conversion. A little bit of CRO goes a long way!

Loyalty 

After converting, maintain ongoing engagement by offering personalised experiences, loyalty rewards, or exclusive access to future seasonal offerings. Encourage customers to share their positive experiences on social media to amplify your brand's reach and foster loyalty.

Conclusion

Adjusting ads for seasonality requires a deep understanding of your specific consumer behaviour and an effective application of behavioural psychology principles. 

By incorporating behavioural nudges, following the EAST framework, and considering the working memory model, we can create highly impactful and engaging seasonal campaigns.

Additionally, aligning with the marketing funnel ensures a seamless customer journey from awareness to loyalty. So, embrace the power of seasonality and employ these strategies to captivate your audience, drive exceptional results, and create lasting connections with your customers.
Thinking about how you could elevate your seasonal ads with behavioural science? Get in touch, we’d love to hear from you!