Do you ever feel like your business has ups and downs throughout the year? Maybe you experience a summer slump or miss out on capitalizing on major holidays like Black Friday. In this post, we'll explore the concept of having a seasonal content strategy and how to plan a content calendar that leverages seasonal trends to smooth out your cash flow and keep your audience engaged year-round.
A Guide to Creating a Winning Seasonal Content Calendar
Use this article as a guide to creating seasonal content. Learn how seasonal content can help you, as a coach, consultant, or service provider, to create a dynamic and engaging content calendar. By strategically incorporating seasonal trends into your content marketing strategy, you can smoothen out cash flow fluctuations, capitalize on timely marketing opportunities, and establish a strong connection with your target audience.
Here's a sneak peek of what you'll learn in this guide:
- Understand the magic of seasonal content and its benefits for your business
- Craft a content calendar that capitalizes on seasonal opportunities to engage your audience
- Seamlessly integrating seasonal content into your existing strategy to keep your content fresh
- Utilizing a marketing calendar to find seasonal trends and craft captivating content that forms a connection with your audience
Harness the Power of Seasonality: Why Seasonal Content Marketing Matters
Our buying behavior is influenced by the seasons. Spring brings thoughts of planting gardens and summer vacations, while winter focuses on holidays and cozy nights in. By incorporating seasonal themes into your content marketing, you can make your business feel more relevant and timely for your audience.
For example, if you're a health coach, you could focus on weight loss resolutions in January and beach-ready body tips in May. Incorporating seasonal content into your strategy allows you to ride the wave of these trends and connect with your audience on a deeper level.
A major goal of digital marketing is to stay relevant to your target audience. Seasonal content marketing presents a potent strategy to achieve just that. Seasonal content capitalizes on trends and events occurring throughout the year. This enables you to connect with where your audience is emotionally throughout the year.
Imagine you're a health and wellness coach. As summer approaches, people naturally gravitate towards content focused on weight loss or healthy recipes for barbeques. By incorporating these seasonal themes into your content strategy, you provide timely and valuable content that keeps your audience engaged.
Here are some of the key benefits of incorporating seasonal content marketing into your strategy:
- Boosts Engagement: Seasonal content resonates with your audience because it's timely and relevant to their current interests and needs.
- Enhances Brand Awareness: Seasonal campaigns can amplify your brand's reach and establish you as a thought leader within your industry.
- Smooths Out Cash Flow: By strategically planning content around seasonal trends, you can anticipate customer needs and create targeted marketing campaigns to address them, ultimately smoothing out cash flow fluctuations.
- Optimizes Marketing Efforts: Seasonal content leverages existing trends, potentially reducing content creation time and expenses.
Conquer Your Content Calendar: A Step-by-Step Guide to Seasonal Content Planning
Now that you understand the magic of seasonal content marketing, let's dive into the practical steps to make it work for you:
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Embrace the Seasons: Start by acknowledging the inherent seasonality in your industry. Are there specific times of the year when demand for your services spikes or dips? Think about holidays, back-to-school season, or tax deadlines that might influence your target audience's needs.
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Identify Your Evergreen Content: Not all content needs to be seasonal. Develop a foundation of evergreen content that provides timeless value to your audience. This could include core service explanations, industry trends, or helpful resources.
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Craft a Content Strategy for the Year: Map out a yearly editorial calendar that incorporates both seasonal and timeless content. This calendar will serve as your roadmap for content creation throughout the year. Pay attention to helpful content that is relevant to your audience and makes it easy for them to find your top-selling products and services.
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Seasonal Content Focuses: Once you have your calendar drafted, brainstorm specific seasonal topics that align with your audience's needs throughout the year. For instance, a tax consultant might focus on content with tips to help business owners with tax preparation around tax season. A yoga studio could create gift guides for yoga enthusiasts using Amazon affiliate links or bundling up their branded gear with gift certificates for an effective seasonal promotion.
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Also Create Content Around Related Opportunities: Expand your seasonal content beyond holidays and major events. Think about smaller seasonal trends or industry-specific peaks in demand. A tutor might create content around keeping kids' school skills sharp with fun summertime activities, like using a paper map on a roadtrip or practicing fractions while baking. Or a health coach might create content around sleep hygiene around the time changes each year or healthy recipe tweaks for traditional holiday favorites.
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Existing Seasonal Content? Revamp It!: Don't reinvent the wheel. Content you've created in previous seasons can often be refreshed and repurposed for the upcoming year. Update statistics, swap out examples, and tailor the content to the current seasonal context.
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Keep it Fresh, Keep it Engaging: Seasonal content is most effective when it's fresh and delivers value. Stay up-to-date on current trends and events, and ensure your content resonates with your brand values.
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Seasonal Content Throughout the Year: Remember, seasonal content marketing is a year-round endeavor. Plan your content in advance to avoid scrambling at the last minute.
Other Things to Keep in Mind: Leverage the Organizational Magic of Content Marketing Calendars
A marketing calendar is your roadmap to content marketing success.
Using a marketing calendar allows you to:
- See your content plan at a glance
- Ensure that your content is aligned with your marketing goals
- Track your content performance
Popular Editorial Calendars/Content Management Tools:
Staying on top of your content marketing requires planning and organization. Choose a tool to keep track of your seasonal marketing campaigns and timeless content.
We're using ClickUp for our Editorial Calendar. We have a different list for each platform and checklists for each type of content. For example video content has a checklist to make sure we've done the keyword research, added a title, thumbnail, description, links, etc. Note: We use this to help us create all of our content.
Some of our clients' favorite tools are:
- Asana or Trello
- Google Calendar
- A Digital Marketing Planner, like our Planner Genius Planners you can use in GoodNotes or a PDF editor
- Even post-it notes on a wall calendar can work well
These work great for planning, creating, and implementing your content strategy and keeping track of to-dos, key dates, and events. Or, if you need help scheduling your content, check out content management tools like CoSchedule, Buffer, and even Canva.
Remember These Key Takeaways
- Integrate seasonal content marketing into your overall strategy for a steady stream of leads and consistent revenue.
- Balance seasonal content with evergreen content to create a well-rounded content library.
- Utilize a content calendar to ensure you're aligned with upcoming seasonal trends.
- Create valuable content that speaks to your target audience's needs throughout the year.
- Regularly refresh and repurpose existing seasonal content to save time and resources.
By following these steps and embracing the power of seasonality, you can transform your content marketing into a sales machine that contributes to your long-term success.
Making Life Easier During Content Creation
Creating content all by yourself without a proven structure for planning can lead you down a road of time-wasting attempts, less-than-stellar results, and a lot (yes, a lot) of frustration. Many coaches get caught here, and as a result, abandon what is one of their most powerful assets for getting new clients and growing their businesses.
Let's face it, when it comes to content creation, planning is more than half of the battle. When you have a good plan in place, creating the actual content for your coaching business feels less like reaching your hand into a jar to dig around and get that last purple jelly bean, and more like turning a kitchen faucet on and just letting everything flow.
That's why we offer Planner Genius. This opportunity is an online group experience designed to keep you focused and productive by learning how to create your own coherent content structure using a proven system, which has been supercharged A.I.
This program can save you a ton of time and frustration. Plus, you get to meet and network with other coaches, entrepreneurs, and service business owners who are also working on building their businesses, just like you are.
Why put off doing something that can boost your business and make your life easier?
Heather is a website designer & marketing strategist who specializes in helping service-based business owners get more clients through online marketing. In addition to owning Wise Owl Marketing, Heather married her sweetheart 29 years ago. Together, they have 3 active kids and a sweet old chocolate lab.
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