Your guide to seasonal content marketing

Are you in an industry where seasonality is a big factor? Here's how to create content for relevant time periods within your space.

The post Your guide to seasonal content marketing appeared first on Search Engine Land.

For most businesses, holidays bring in revenue – and a lot of it. In the United States, total retail spend during the 2021 holiday season was $1.221 trillion, according to Insider Intelligence.

Aside from holidays, seasonality influences select industries – where specific times of the year are more popular than others. The fitness, healthcare and ecommerce spaces are just a few industries with seasons. 

If you work in an industry where seasonality is a big factor, then your brand needs to participate. Otherwise, you could be losing out on significant revenue opportunities.

In this article, you’ll learn why seasonal content is important and get tips to help plan your seasonal content strategy for the year.

What is seasonal content?

Seasonal content focuses on topics, trends and events that happen at the same time of year. This type of content should embody the lifestyle of your brand and the industry you’re in. 

For example, suppose you’re a health insurance provider. In that case, it’s essential to present helpful content during the annual enrollment period (AEP) as it’s the time of year when an individual already enrolled in a program can change their plan, or someone turning 65 can pick a plan. 

Another example is ecommerce. Marketers can develop content for plenty of holidays, such as Amazon Prime Day, Labor Day, Black Friday, and so on. 

If your industry has seasons, this can help you plan your content calendar ahead and give you time to develop and implement. Doing so helps your seasonal content to get indexed in search engines and shared in newsletters. You can also create promotions around these times of year.

Evergreen vs. seasonal content

It’s important to understand the difference between evergreen content and seasonal content.

Evergreen content is more of a long-term play and is mostly always useful, no matter what time of year. One evergreen topic could be “What you should know about peanut allergies.” It does not matter what time of year you would promote that, as people who suffer from peanut allergies suffer all year round. 

A more seasonal content topic could be “What you should know about the flu in 2022,” where you can speak about the flu season in that particular year, symptoms and any other important information about a specific strain of the flu. 

Seasonal content is more of an immediate need that can go viral, or create quick engagement within social media, while evergreen helps for the long game. Both can be updated, which we will talk about later.

Why does seasonal content matter?

When seasonal content is done properly, it can attract new people to your brand, increase engagement and push them into your workflows or sales cycle.

Seasonal content shows that your brand is also relevant and staying current. Not having seasonal content, especially when your industry can leverage it, might imply your brand is stale or irrelevant. 

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The benefits

There are many benefits to having seasonal content as a part of your overall marketing strategy, including: 

• Allowing your brand to promote something special, such as a sale or other product rollout.
• Educating your audience on important topics. Think how the health and wellness industry promotes kicking off new healthy habits in the new year.
• Keeping your current customers loyal, especially if they know you typically do promotions during certain times of year (i.e., Amazon Prime Day). It can also bring new people into your sales cycle.
• Increased referrals, especially if you have referral marketing as a part of your strategy.
• Positive, emotional responses from your audience (just like the one below!).

The challenges

Seasonal content also comes with some challenges:

• It requires you and your team to be organized – planning ahead and ensuring the content is developed and executed in time for your audience to find it.
• There is competition around promotions. You need to make sure your content stands out enough so people will see it and click.
• Posting on social media is insufficient. All aspects of your marketing, including email, blogs, videos, and anything else you invest in should also push this seasonal content.
• Establishing the right goals ahead of time. If you're trying to increase revenue during the holiday season, dig into your data to find your top-selling products and promote those, or perhaps make a bundle sale around the seasonal event to celebrate.
• Being creative. That said, remember that typical holidays aren't the only ones to focus on. There are tons of other small holidays you can promote, like Star Trek Day or National Dog Week.

How to find seasonal content that will work for your brand

Here are a few tips to determine seasonal content topics to work on.

• Look at relevant trends or top hashtags on social media to find content that you could piggyback off around your seasonal promotions.
• Check Google Trends to see if there's any content that can inspire you, or look at historical content.
• Compile information around target demographics. Your content may not be suited for "everybody is our target market," so get specific.
• Use tools like Semrush for keyword analysis to find and analyze keyword variations.
• Look at historical data to see how products, posts, or your site's traffic was affected in previous years. You may find opportunities you can recycle.
• Review testimonials or get feedback from your customers on what they want to see, then develop copy.

Refresh your existing seasonal content

You can also take advantage of existing seasonal content pieces. While it's not evergreen, seasonal content on an indexed older page can easily be updated and reused to give your brand a lift.

Here are some tips:

• If you have a lull in your content efforts, look back and analyze old content around seasonal topics and start developing ways this can help you in the future.
• As mentioned before, get ahead with this seasonal content. Start building your products and find out how seasonal content can help boost engagement and sales.
• Avoid adding dates to URLs around seasonal content. Avoiding years or dates in URLs will let you recycle content without any issues.
• Publish refreshed seasonal content as new. You don't have to create a whole new page. Simply update the existing blog post or page.

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