5 Ways to Win Your Seasonal Ad Campaign
In our twenty-six year history, SMI has had tremendous success with seasonal campaigns for products and services spanning all sectors.
We’ve driven immediate response during short promo periods such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday–as well as longer flights focused on holiday messaging, summertime and back-to-school promotions, tax season, and seminars offered for a limited time. Whether you’re running an evergreen campaign or want to drive response for a shorter time period, our expertise can help you reach your KPIs.
Here are five tips for winning seasonal campaigns from two of SMI’s media experts, Broadcast Strategist Pam Wolfgram and Podcast Strategist Lisa Risk.
1. Blow Up the Frequency
All of SMI’s successful campaigns have one thing in common, explains Pam. “If you have a short window to run, you need to blow up the frequency. It doesn’t matter what channel you’re running; there’s no room to be conservative. Combine a heavy frequency schedule with specific messaging that drives home a sense of urgency—for example, ‘This offer expires on this date.’ That really is the recipe for success, whether it’s a short-duration or even a longer-duration seasonal flight,” says Pam.
2. Be Nimble
Being nimble is critical for seasonal campaigns, as SMI’s experience can attest. “Thinking back to our success with a Fantasy Sports League campaign, we positioned around the critical point in the season, the opening of NFL season,” says Pam. “We plotted a significant portion of their budget to land as close to opening day of NFL as possible, running at least one spot an hour, and then budgets tailed off each week after that. The season didn’t end, but the bread-and-butter of their campaign was closer to the beginning of the season. We over-indexed on performance during that window—enough so that it could buffer later weeks in the flight when response had started to trail off. That campaign grew tremendously over just a few years.”
For other clients running seasonal campaigns for gifting holidays, including flowers and gourmet food items, SMI often changes the offer as the holiday approaches. “As the holiday gets closer and closer, the offers get more and more compelling. We concentrate as much media as we can in the days immediately before the holiday (allowing time for shipping, of course!) because that’s where conversion is the absolute strongest,” says Pam. “We really get creative with changing out spots. We regularly do mid-week creative changes, and the creative will run one or two days to highlight a pop-up sale for a special bundle, then we’ll change everything back. Those few weeks are crazy-hectic but fun and rewarding! There’s true value in being nimble and really locking in on where the promotion is going to hit heaviest.”
This strategy also applies to campaigns that aren’t seasonal, but have a shorter duration, such as seminars. “We run at heavy frequency, and we change messaging as the event gets closer. We’ll remind people, “The events are on Saturday and Sunday, and this is your last chance to sign up,” says Pam.
3. Fill a Need at the Right Time
“Another piece of why these campaigns work is because we’re really filling a need at the right time,” says Lisa. “For example, we ran a podcast campaign for a digital picture frame that is such an easy, perfect gift to get your parents and your grandparents. It looks amazing, like you put a ton of thought into it, but it’s just really easy to order and to get. So I think capitalizing on the time period when a product is really in demand is what works.”
4. Plan Ahead
The medium on which you’ll run your seasonal campaign will determine how far in advance you need to plan. If you’re planning to run a holiday campaign on podcasts, it’s important to start planning in August or September. “From the host-read podcast side, shows sell out,” says Lisa. “It’s such a busy time.”
On the radio side, there is a bit more time to plan a holiday campaign, says Pam, “but if a client wants to be in specific markets, we definitely need a longer runway.” For a national campaign, on the other hand, “we don’t have to be quite as aggressive with our planning. If they just want to be on the Christmas format nationally, for instance, I could wait until October,” she says.
5. Consider Seasonal Format Changes
During the holiday season, numerous radio stations across the country switch formats to holiday music. The Holiday format creates a separate category. “We have seasonal campaigns, we have evergreen campaigns, and then we have the Holiday format where listenership skyrockets for a period of three weeks—sometimes more, depending on when they flip,” says Pam. “But the listenership really does explode, sometimes by more than 2x. Sometimes the rates do, too, but that doesn’t seem to matter. Those listeners are truly engaged, and they’re ready to make a purchase.”
When it makes sense, SMI will offer seasonal format buys to our evergreen campaigns running in December. “It’s not a seasonal campaign, it’s a seasonal format,” explains Pam. “But the time is right. So it’s a way to be opportunistic. Some of our evergreen campaigns can be opportunistic with the right listener at the right time. We go heavy on frequency, and usually it works very well.”
Final Thoughts
Want to find something that hits for your brand this holiday–or any–season? Whether you’re interested in a seasonal campaign, or an evergreen campaign on a seasonal format, SMI can unlock audio’s potential to increase your brand awareness and drive immediate response.