Blog / How To Handle B2B Marketing during Holidays

If there’s one thing for certain – there’s always a holiday just around the corner!

Here are our top tips to navigate B2B marketing during seasonal breaks and public holidays.

Better brand awareness

Seasonal breaks can cause a lag in online activity across both B2B and B2C. So there is little point super fuelling paid campaigns if your B2B audiences are not actively searching for solutions.

However maintaining strategic brand awareness is important and this type of marketing should continue throughout the year. According to Linkedin, customers are more likely to convert if they’ve been exposed to your brand at least 3-5 times.

Remember that even when on a break, B2B customers will likely be in ‘open learning mode’. Whilst not actively searching for business solutions, educational online content can still engage your audience during downtime. This type of brand awareness might include easily digestible content such as short videos, social media tips or accessible e-books.

Holiday themes

Holiday breaks are a great time to serve more personalised, light touch content. Perhaps linked to themes of the season – if relevant! Personalised marketing is 26% more likely to be opened and holidays are the perfect time to show the human side of your company.

This might include a personalised holiday greetings from your CEO but at the very least, acknowledge the holiday break and offer lighter educational content. Alternatively you might use customer data to serve a unique ‘year in review’ that helps make customers feel valued by your business.

Warming up for Summer

Holidays come and go much faster than you think so preparation is vital. Re-fresh those key questions. What’s your objective? Who are you targeting? Do you have everything you need ready and in place?

Look at insights from last year’s campaigns. A data driven approach will give you a clear idea of what does and doesn’t work with your audience during seasonal breaks. Incorporating these learnings will help you create lead-generating campaigns.

Post Easter is when your lead generation campaign should really heat up again and become much more hyper targeted. During this period, consider a re-marketing strategy, especially if you’ve already been generating good engagement through branded content. Now is the opportunity to build your audience profile and re-engage those customers who may have read your articles or explored your website. It’s the season to get up close and personal!

Despite a cookieless future, right now re-marketing will help you draw in those potential customers who were curious but did not convert (yet!). Investing in this type of targeting will help harness new customers, putting you well ahead of your competitors.

And remember, any targeted digital marketing will work best when building on the foundation stones of good brand awareness.

Know your customer

Probably one of the oldest rules in our marketing book! Essentially, don’t embark on your digital marketing campaign until you really know enough about your customer. Defining clear personas will help you curate the right messaging, tone, creative content, platform and budget. Deep customer understanding underpin the foundation stones for effective engagement. But remember, customer needs change – so you need to be agile and flexible too!

Be content smart

If there’s one certainty about your marketplace this season. You are not the only business actively exploring new ways to convert customers! A significant new business demand to replenish 2021 covid impact losses is being felt industry-wide. So consider agile, smart tactics to keep engagement high without blowing the budget!

Short form video content for time poor business customers is a sure fire way to maintain engagement. And video content can be edited, spliced and re-shared to ensure you optimise a return on your video production budget.

Tune in and turn out

Plan a content calendar that speaks directly to your customers and their search requirements right now. In B2B terms, this could be about how your product or service helps reduce costs, increases business efficiency or provides tools for better teamwork and collaboration.

Planning your activity and budget now will enable better performances throughout the year. Even though some B2B business sectors are still facing confidence challenges, it’s likely that some of the competition may have reduced so even though there could be less demand, there are still opportunities for taking a business leadership position to drive higher revenue.

The festive highway

Seasonal nuances are incredibly important considerations and there’s a marked formula for B2B digital marketing in the run up to Christmas. You have until around 20 December to deploy your digital marketing tactics and the majority of your budget! Usually once you’re past that key date in December, evidence shows a 60% drop off in demand and engagement.

Keep 10-15% of your budget in the tank for ticking over until the New Year. And remember that all important lesson about maintaining branding awareness whilst your paid marketing takes a break.

Giving something back

The festive season is a topical moment to gift and demonstrate gratitude through giving something back to your target marketplace. Even in the B2B sector. Remember Black Friday and Cyber Monday discounts aren’t just for B2C!

Equally, giving back could be about helping enterprise customers plan for the Year ahead. What valuable insights could you share in an e-book or white paper that will help those potential clients navigate the future? How can you share market trends and insights – before they have planned for it?

If you need any support planning your seasonal B2B digital marketing – we’re here to help! somebody@somebodydigital.com