Fall into Better Digital Marketing Practices

Fall is officially here. The colours are changing, the leaves are falling, and most importantly search term trends are changing. Retail stores invest lots of time and money into updating their storefronts and physical displays from season to season, and digital stores should be no different. While not necessarily on the same scale, websites should also be spending time and money to refocus their marketing strategy with shifting seasonal trends in sales, keywords, and customer intent. 

Embrace the End of Summer

Taking advantage of seasonal shopping and search trends doesn’t mean you have to solely focus on the approaching season. Celebrate the end of summer with a big clearance sale to clear out old inventory and make way for the incoming fall and winter styles. Post about the sales on social media, add flavour text and graphics on your site to help with SEO, and send out a newsletter campaign to tell all your customers their favourite summer products are on sale. Create FOMO by delisting the products after the sale(if inventory space allows) and relist them again next year, at regular price. This is a great way to increase basket size while getting rid of any products that didn’t perform as well as expected. 

Pumpkin Spice Slurpees are the newest addition to the PSL crazy

Seasonal Trends

A simple and effective way to keep up with seasonal trends is to hop onto the latest or most popular fad. For Fall, that usually means fall colours like orange, yellow, red and brown and of course, pumpkins. If you have seen marketing campaigns for and food and beverage companies this fall, pumpkin spice is being added to every product under the sun. Companies are not only jumping on the popularity of this seasonal-flavour, they are poking fun at how popular this mix of spices has become and using it in products that most people would never ask for. A great example is the Pumpkin Spice Slurpee from 7/11. I don’t think 7/11 is going to see huge sales numbers for this new slurpee (although I might be wrong), but the novelty of it will inevitably bring more people into the store, where they have their version of the Pumpkin Spice Coffee available as well. 

Halloween Spooktacular

Another great aspect of fall to use in your marketing efforts is Halloween. There is obviously a much shorter time frame for you to get returns from a new marketing campaign, but that doesn't mean you shouldn’t try. Something as simple as a Halloween themed discount code can help regain lost customers, and boost sales from regular customers. You can combine this with some Halloween themed creatives to post on social media that feature your discount code, which will also give you insight into how well your social media posts are bringing in customers.