5 Seasonal Branding Tips to Increase Holiday Sales

The holidays present huge opportunities for businesses to increase sales, and these can be boosted further if you liven up your marketing approach with seasonal branding.

Seasonal branding is a branding approach where you augment your brand identity for a short period. If brick-and-mortar businesses decorate their stores during the holidays, for example, you can also “decorate” your online presence through seasonal branding.

It’s important to note, however, that this doesn’t mean you are rebranding—you essentially retain the core branding and only change up the “look” of your brand to fit the season.

How to make seasonal branding work for your business

Tweaking your brand identity for special holidays also adds a layer of authenticity to your brand, giving customers the idea that you also care about what happens around you and not just about your business.

So how do you make seasonal branding work for your business? Here are a few tips:

1. Stay true to your branding

As with any branding effort, it’s crucial to keep elements of your identity that are most familiar to your audience. For seasonal branding, one of these includes choosing seasonal colors that work well with your brand’s color palette.

For example, while Christmas is predominantly green and red, it doesn’t mean you have to go all out on that theme. Silver, white, gold, and pastel pink, yellow, and green can still be good choices for Christmas.

The important thing is to choose brand identity elements that make the most sense to your branding.

Coca-Cola makes sure that their branding remains familiar

2. Go beyond Christmas

A very important point to remember here is that “seasonal” does not only mean Christmas. It can also apply to any special occasion, event, or holiday, such as Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, New Year, Independence Day, Easter, Halloween, the welcoming of new seasons, and much more.

If you run your business on a global scale, it also pays to be sensitive to other cultural norms. For example, the Fourth of July is celebrated only in the US, and some religions don’t celebrate Christmas.

When crafting your seasonal branding message, try to be inclusive as much as you can; otherwise, you run the risk of alienating some of your customers.

McDonald’s cleverly celebrates Halloween with a candy-shaped burger wrapper

3. Have different approaches for each platform

Each platform calls for a different approach when you decide to spruce up your branding. As much as possible, keep the changes minimal so that it’s easier to revert to your core branding once the occasion is over.

A few ideas on how to apply seasonal branding for each platform:

4. Make special offers valuable

Holidays and special occasions call for equally special offers—such as themed apparel (Halloween shirts), novelty items, or seasonal promotions (New Year gym membership promos).

Many businesses make the mistake of devaluing their services/products just to stay on top of the competition, especially during the holidays when every brand is offering special discounts. Devaluing might attract more customers, but it might affect the reputation of your brand—cheaper doesn’t always mean better.

Instead of cutting down the prices to boost sales, you can also opt to offer bonuses, such as additional free gym sessions to get back on track after the holiday feast. The important thing to remember is to make your offers valuable.

Starbucks’ pumpkin spice latte is an all-time Fall Season favorite

5. Keep it simple

Lastly, keep it simple. We mentioned before that changes should be simple enough to make it easier to revert to your regular branding. Keeping it simple also means making sure that you stay familiar throughout the changes.

When it comes to seasonal ad campaigns and promotions, don’t go over the top just to be noticed—instead, curate your brand messaging to make sure that it resonates well with your target audience. This is a better way to stand out more from the competition than going all out and desensitizing your audience amid all the advertising “noise” during the holidays.

Disney’s2020 Christmas ad is simple, heartwarming, and culture-sensitive

Do you need help with your branding and design needs?

Branding encompasses a number of strategies, and it’s all the more important to be careful with how you approach it when you choose to make occasion-themed changes to your branding.

If you need help, Ilfusion has the expertise to guide you with our tried-and-tested branding architecture process and our team of professional designers.

Get started today by calling us at 888-420-5115, or sending us an email at [email protected].

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