After all the madness of the end-of-year festivities and the subsequent winter sales, spring is a time when sales start to level off. For many seasonal industries, it marks the midway point between the end of the winter collection and the launching of the summer one. Although the weather forecast and news can affect business and sales volume, this doesn’t mean you should relax and go with the flow. To help you complete your checklist, rally the troops and organize future operations, we’ve got pieces of advice and best practices for you.

CONTENT MARKETING: PLANNING AND ORGANIZING

Content marketing is vital for your brand. It helps you to build customer loyalty and generate new leads. Quieter periods offer the perfect opportunity to organize the content you want to share. This means scheduling future blog posts, social media posts and for the more daring amongst you, newsjacking operations. Whilst some of these may be related to current affairs, others can be prepared in advance:

SPRING – IN APRIL:

• The customary April Fools’ Day joke
• Easter-themed posts

SPRING – IN MAY:

• Star Wars Day
• Cannes Film Festival
• Mother’s Day
• The French Open

SPRING – IN JUNE:

• Father’s Day
• The Tour de France

To make sure that your content marketing is effective and not too time-consuming, you need a good organization. Production scheduling, editorial line updates, strategic theme selection, and competitor monitoring should be all be carried out during the Spring Season.

ORGANIZING SUMMER SALES

Of course, there’s still plenty of time as the sales won’t start until the end of June, but it’s better to plan ahead for future campaigns and collaborations.

You can also make the most of this period by exploring influencer marketing: finding influencers that reflect your values and could promote your brand. This work can be carried out independently or in collaboration with an agency to save time. Influencer marketing is a tool which requires a strategy. It’s generally not enough to have a single influencer sharing a single message. It’s better to take the time to find influencers that match your personas and to divide your messages amongst them over the coming months.

By the same token, there are other promotional tools such as affiliate marketing that can also be employed. Affiliates help promote your products and services in exchange for sales commission via marketplaces and third-party websites (blogs, YouTube channels, websites, etc.). Again, finding influencers to promote your offers cannot be accomplished right off the bat. Forward planning is the key to success.

This is also the time to keep in touch with your community via email campaigns. It doesn’t make sense to wait for a promotional offer to reach out to your customers. Instead, ask them their opinion on a particular theme or project, share an experience, launch a competition or create a new scheme (members-only club, taster day or product launch, etc.).

Finally, in anticipation of the summer sales, you can refine or reorganize your website, update your mobile app and launch a series of A/B tests to optimize the customer journey.

UPDATE AND OPTIMIZE YOUR TOOLS

Even if business continues between sales periods, sales volume still peaks at these key times. Not to mention that people often take long weekends in months like May which often corresponds to a decreased level of activity in certain industries. It, therefore, makes sense to get all your revision and maintenance work done in this time. Website updates, backups, web server updates, tests, launching of new platforms and tools… it’s time for a spring clean!

Finally, spring is the time to breathe new life into your business. This could mean fine-tuning internal processes (monitoring, customer services, social media moderation, etc.), analyzing stats from past campaigns or optimizing internal and external collaborations.

Predicting and mastering workload flows, season by season will allow you to better distribute your technological, human and financial resources throughout the year. Spring is no exception. The most organized traders will also prove to be the most flexible and responsive if the need arises.

Get in touch with our team of experts for help with updating your campaigns and designing your business operations calendar.