A seasonal marketing strategy is not a Christmas banner on your homepage and a few “Black Friday” emails you wrote in a panic the night before. It is a plan, built around when your customers actually buy, that tells you what to say, where to say it, and when to spend the money to say it. Most businesses I meet have some version of seasonal activity happening already, they just haven’t called it a strategy and haven’t planned it far enough in advance to make it work properly. That gap between “doing something seasonal” and “having a seasonal marketing strategy” is usually where the revenue gets left on the table.
I’ve been doing this for 25 years, long enough to have watched seasonal trends come and go and come back again under a different name. The businesses that win aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones who plan early, know their own sales patterns cold, and don’t try to be seasonal about everything at once.
What is a seasonal marketing strategy and why does it matter?
It is a plan that aligns your marketing activity with the natural peaks and troughs in your industry, whether that’s driven by weather, holidays, school terms, tax deadlines, or buying habits specific to your sector. It matters because most businesses are not flat all year round. Demand moves. If your marketing doesn’t move with it, you’re either shouting into silence during quiet months or missing the window entirely when demand is high.
The mistake I see most often is businesses treating every quarter the same, running the same messaging, the same offers, the same channels, regardless of what’s actually happening in their market. A proper seasonal marketing strategy means accepting that January isn’t June, and building your plan around that reality rather than fighting it.
How do you find your own seasonal pattern?
Look at 24 to 36 months of your own sales data before you look at anything else. Industry benchmarks are a starting point, not the answer, because your specific business, location, and customer base will have quirks the generic reports won’t show you. If you don’t have that much data yet, ask your longest-serving staff member when the phone tends to go quiet and when it doesn’t stop ringing. They usually know before the spreadsheet does.
When should you start planning your seasonal marketing strategy?
Earlier than feels comfortable. As a rough rule, start planning three to four months before the peak period you’re targeting. That gives you time to build creative, book advertising space, brief any suppliers, and test messaging before you’re relying on it to perform. Businesses that start planning in the month itself are always playing catch-up, and it shows in the results.
This is also where a lot of smaller businesses fall down, not through lack of ambition but lack of headspace. If you’re running the business day to day, seasonal planning is the thing that gets pushed to “next week” indefinitely. That’s exactly the kind of gap we fill at SCM, whether that means setting the seasonal marketing strategy and coaching you to run it yourself, or taking it off your hands entirely and running it for you.
Does referral marketing strategy fit into seasonal planning?
Yes, and it’s underused. A referral marketing strategy tends to work best layered onto your seasonal marketing strategy rather than run separately all year round. Ask for referrals straight after a strong seasonal period, when customers have just had a good experience and are more likely to think of someone else who’d benefit. Trying to generate referrals during your quiet months, when goodwill is lower and your own team is stretched thinner, is harder work for less return.
- Ask for the referral within a week of a completed seasonal sale, while the experience is still fresh.
- Give the person doing the referring a specific reason to act, not a vague “let us know if you know anyone”.
- Track which season produces your best referrals so you can weight future effort accordingly.
How does this apply if you’re growing under a scheme like Help to Grow?
If you’re working through a growth programme, a seasonal marketing strategy should sit inside that wider plan, not run alongside it as a separate project. We’ve written in more detail about how that works in our guide to Help to Grow marketing strategy, but the short version is this: growth schemes give you structure and sometimes funding, but they don’t tell you when your customers actually buy. That part is still down to you, or to whoever is setting it on your behalf.
What does a seasonal marketing strategy look like if you have no marketing team at all?
This is where I think most of the advice online falls apart, because it’s written as though every business already has a marketing manager and a media budget sitting behind them. Plenty of the businesses I work with have neither. If that’s you, a seasonal marketing strategy is still absolutely achievable, it just needs to be scaled to what you can actually manage.
That might mean picking two or three key seasonal periods rather than trying to run activity all year, and being deliberate about the channels you use rather than spreading effort thin across all of them. For some businesses, that’s a focused push on LinkedIn in the run-up to a B2B buying season. For others, it’s a tightly timed email sequence and nothing else. The right approach depends entirely on where your customers actually are, not on what’s trending.
We work with businesses at both ends of this. Some already have a team or an agency and need someone senior above them to make sure the seasonal marketing strategy is actually joined up rather than three separate people doing three separate things. Others have nobody in-house at all, and for them we either build the strategy and coach them through running it, or take the whole thing on and manage it directly. Neither approach is more “proper” than the other. It depends on your workload, your budget, and how much of this you actually want to be doing yourself.
What’s the biggest mistake businesses make with seasonal marketing strategy?
Treating it as a one-off event rather than a recurring system. Built properly once, it should get easier and more profitable every year, because you’re refining rather than starting from scratch. Businesses that reinvent their approach from nothing each season lose that compounding benefit and end up spending more for the same result, or worse.
The Chartered Institute of Marketing has written extensively on the value of planning cycles over ad hoc campaigns, and the data consistently backs up what most experienced marketers already know from experience: consistency beats intensity. You can read more on their site at cim.co.uk.
A seasonal marketing strategy isn’t complicated in concept. It’s discipline in execution, starting earlier than feels necessary, knowing your own numbers better than the industry averages, and being honest about what you can actually run without burning yourself out. If you’d rather have someone senior build that plan with you or run it for you outright, get in touch and we’ll talk through what that would actually look like for your business.