Seasonality in Native Advertising: What You Need to Know

Planning seasonal marketing activities is essential for every performance marketer. Even if your business is not selling Valentine’s day cards, you still need to be aware of seasonality and people’s natural buying trends in marketing.  

Just like adding lights to your home in December to get into the holiday spirit, running seasonal campaigns can help you put your audience in a festive mindset and drive conversions. We’re approaching the most holiday-packed part of the year, so it’s time to learn how to take advantage of the seasons and prepare a successful programmatic digital advertising strategy for your business.


What Does Seasonality Actually Mean?

Seasonality refers to predictable trends taking place every calendar year during a particular season, month, or day. There are plenty of periods when some products are rocking, whereas others are left in the background. That could be seasons like summer, holidays like Christmas, special sales like Black Friday, or annual occasions like Mother’s Day. 

There are various official and non-traditional holidays, as well as annual cultural events all around the globe all year round. The opportunities are huge. Almost never-ending. 

Besides, you don’t need any exclusive holiday products to benefit from the financial boost. According to Deloitte, in 2021, on average consumers spent 42% of their Christmas budget on experiences, so special holiday deals work just as well. 

Whether you’re running a seasonal business or have a stable sales flow, there are always creative ways to incorporate native advertising together with the power of seasonality. Even a visual refresher that is tied to the period can do the job and drive engagement. What is crucial is to stand out from the crowd and you can accomplish it by doing something unique. Colors together with emotions definitely have a huge impact on buying decisions. 


So, How to Make your Seasonal Native Campaign Right?

Find Your Opportunities

You should definitely create your own marketing calendar and highlight potential seasonal opportunities for your business. Such an agenda can be regularly revised and updated over the year. It’s going to help you not only to stay on track but also to adjust your activities to specific countries.

No doubt, geography & cultural knowledge is crucial here, as the offer you’re promoting must fit every GEO  you’re targeting. Countries in the Southern Hemisphere like Australia have different seasonal cycles than the ones in Europe. Not to mention that there are 26 completely different New Year’s Days around the world. 

Continue With the Research

Always check what your competitors have done in the past, so you won’t waste time on ads that haven’t performed well. But don’t copy them, get all the ideas together and do better. Plus, you should store your notes, materials & data in one place, so you can analyze and recycle your most successful campaigns next year. 

Trends can and do change, so be cautious and double-check whether the offer you’re promoting is trending. Hands down, Google Trends can be a great tool for that. It’s simply a gold mine of knowledge for advertisers trying to understand what sort of seasonal patterns may apply to their business. And what’s even more important – at which point of time.

Also, AI can give you great insights on when and what to advertise. Ask it to analyze past trends – unless you have a truly revolutionary product that is new to the market, you will get tips and suggestions.

Make sure that you are using a language model that is connected to the Internet – so Microsoft Bing or Google Bard rather than ChatGPT, which is trained on data that is two years old.

Plan, Plan, Plan

With the research done, your groundwork is complete. Just remember that a successful campaign isn’t built overnight. Very often consumers plan their purchases in advance, that’s why you should also organize your content effectively from the beginning.

Well, bear in mind that not only starting too late can bring negative effects. Starting too early can cause the campaign to be forgotten about and fail just as much. So, find a happy medium and avoid fighting the noise. 

Track, test, and repeat 

Regardless of what campaigns you’re running, we can’t stress the importance of tracking enough.

And I would stress the importance of using proper tracking tools in specific campaigns like seasonal advertising even further. Why? With ads revolving strictly around specific holidays your targeting needs to be on point. After all, there isn’t much time to hit the sweet spot. And how can you be sure it’s working? By tacking. 

With Voluum tracking visits characteristics like country, device type, and so on are made easy with our detailed reporting. You can drill down to pretty much any data you deem important in basically real-time and if it’s not bringing you desired results – go to testing. Keeping one eye on reports and the other on A/B testing campaigns might seem like a  lot to take on but that’s why tools like ours exist. Voluum is designed to take that painstaking work away and help you by offering what’s most important – precise data

Get That Creative Energy Flowing

A good marketing message is definitely essential. It should evoke emotion and trigger curiosity in the user’s mind, as well as seamlessly direct them to take desirable and profitable actions. The key is understanding what your audience cares about and letting them know that there is something new to see.

Keep in mind that content created around a season is much more likely to be helpful and valued by your audience. That’s why every campaign should have a point with an attention-grabbing and engaging storyline appropriately suited to the specific seasonal needs. It might be a good idea to add a landing page consisting of recommended gift-worthy products, coupon codes, season-specific testimonials, or underlined shipping deadlines.

Easy-peasy! Just treat your seasonal content like you would any of your other evergreen campaigns. Be creative and choose the best combination of images and words for your ad to shine brighter than ever. What’s more, our blog has some great tips on how to make your native headlines & creatives bring more and more clients.

Keep Your Eyes and Ears Wide Open 

We all know that very often not everything goes as planned. That’s why you need to keep an eye on your campaign and be prepared for quick modifications. Seeing poor performance? Don’t stick to just one strategy and test.

Always have a plan B or even C, in case your plan A is not bringing the results you were hoping for. Little adjustments can sometimes save the campaign and quickly enhance its performance.

Check out our essential guide to proven native testing strategies to learn more about all the key elements that move the needle towards the success of a native campaign. Be aware that testing is by no means limited to landing pages, headlines, or images.


Let’s Wrap It Up

As you can see, seasonality doesn’t mean offering a discount once in a while. It’s about getting into the mindset of your audience and analyzing what actually motivates them to make purchases at given points of time each year.

No doubt, annual trends and occasional peaks in web user engagement can not only drive great revenue results but also grow your brand awareness. It’s time to connect with your customers in ways you weren’t before. 

So, don’t be afraid to spark your creative side and come up with some holiday season native campaigns.

Go ahead and start with Voluum today!

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