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4 Easy Seasonal Online Content Ideas For Your Business
By Rodney Laws | Content
Writing a blog for your business can be difficult at the best of times — particularly if you’re not a natural writer. What to write about to keep your site fresh and interesting is something that keeps entrepreneurs on their toes when it comes to content marketing.
By using seasonal themes as inspiration for your content ideas, you can come up with plenty of posts that are fun and engaging for your customers, and will help you to push your products.
Below we’ve come up with four seasonal content ideas for your website to get you started. Read on to find out more.
With Christmas rapidly approaching, jumping on the bandwagon/Santa’s sleigh is crucial with your content.
You want to be light-hearted and amusing with your content, but also subtly emphasize how great your products are and what fantastic gifts they would make for friends and family.
There are a range of different ideas you can write about when it comes to Christmas content:
Whatever the post or format, the aim of Christmas content is to tap into your customer’s emotions. You don’t want to be too aggressive and salesy; your seasonal content must be helpful, cheerful and interesting.
Ideally — i.e. to convert those leads to sales — you also want to be personalizing your content. This means tailoring ads, emails or messages to suit your customer’s wants and needs. You can do this by segmenting email campaigns, or providing personal product recommendations to users based on their previous purchases.
January 1st: by the time it’s come around, we’re sick of all the mulled wine and beer we’ve drunk, the candies and chips we’ve gobbled down, and we’re another turkey down. Everyone’s put on half a stone and we’re all feeling slightly disappointed in ourselves…
Time for some healthy eating, exercise regimes, and feeling fresh! January is the perfect opportunity to start anew — make resolutions and stick to them, strive to be successful, start new hobbies, and break old, bad habits.
As an ecommerce store, you can create content that will help your customers achieve some of these goals. After all, the product that you’re providing benefits them, or improves their lives in some way; why not take the plunge and help out a little bit more?
For example, if you’re a health and fitness website, you can post how-to guides or video tutorials for the best beginner workouts or how to get abs for the summer. If you’re a food store, you can write fun and healthy recipes for budding cooks to experiment with.
Or why not give people some insight into what it’s like to run a business? You could explain how you started yours, detail the challenges and pitfalls, and give some advice regarding how to get started in the retail world. Think about offering some shortcuts to help people who feel daunted get inspired, particularly in light of the many options of the digital world.
Plenty of people don’t know how hard it actually is to run a business — they assume it’s much trickier than it is, and never bother trying (it’s complicated, but far from impossible). Let people know that they can do things their way.
Alternatively, if you’re a B2B company, why not detail how your software or service could help to manage your client’s business better in the new year— either by fixing their finances, saving them time or boosting their brand with marketing?
Halloween is a fun chance to get your ecommerce store dressed up and in the spirit of things. If you’ve built your ecommerce store using a builder like WooCommerce, it’s easy enough to pick and apply a temporary Halloween-theme (or another seasonally-appropriate theme). By making changes to your store, you’re giving it a fresh new look and giving your brand a feeling of fun.
Once your online store has its terrifying trick-or-treating costume on, you can create some Halloween-inspired creepy content and get people talking.
Halloween is a good time to get visual with your content, so take some photos of your team dressed up (brownie points if you have an office dog who doesn’t mind donning a costume), shoot your own inhouse horror film, or create some spooktacular infographics and images to adorn your blog posts and site. Don’t forget to post on social media to show off your spellbinding efforts.
Including a mention or feature of your products or service is a bonus but not the main focus of a Halloween content campaign. The aim of the game is to interest your followers, gain some new ones, and prove that you’re a fun brand that’s worth watching.
Are you even a real business if you don’t make the most of the Thanksgiving weekend to offer your customers amazing deals on your products?
Black Friday is now notorious in online retail; brick-and-mortar shops close, and ecommerce stores tout their wares and reel consumers in with mega sales. The Thanksgiving weekend is a huge sales period; last year, US consumers spent an incredible $3.7 billion online, nearly 28% up on the $2.9 billion that was spent online a year ago.
One thing to consider is the prospect of temporarily branching out from whatever your business already does with a secondary ecommerce store. The purpose of this is to avoid needing to make alterations to your usual stock lineup by using something like dropshipping (a shipping model that allows you to sell items without needing to get involved with the fulfillment) — you can then create content that concerns that additional set of products.
For instance, you can buy an existing store that’s already configured for dropshipping, fill it up with BFCM-viable products (such as phone cases, cheap consumer electronics, or items of clothing), promote them heavily with optimized content (focussing on FOMO and hype) to make some quick sales, then sell the store on when the period ends.
Something to be mindful of, however, is where you plan on selling. BFCM is a national event, and an ecommerce store can get buys from anywhere in the country, but ecommerce sales tax (in light of 2018’s major change to how it’s handled) can be awkward. If you’re only planning to sell in your state, then choose accordingly.
Whether you run sales on your existing products, expand your range with a second store, or do both, remember that offers and sales normally last for the whole four-day stretched-out weekend — our advice is to stick to this to avoid disappointing your customers. You’ll also be able to draw in even more customers during this time period.
The trick with your seasonal content in this instance is to ensure that your customers are keeping an eye on your store for a sneak-peak of what’s going to be available on Black Friday. Build hype with your content — you want a combination of fun Thanksgiving posts, but also allude towards something happening afterwards that all of your readers need to get excited about. You can drop hints with fun email marketing campaigns; keep them short and sweet with a strong call-to-action.
Seasonal content is something you should definitely utilize as a business owner. It doesn’t matter which niche you fall under, whether you’re B2B or B2C, or how big or small your business is — seasonal content will boost your engagement and sales.
Plan your seasonal content early — with some room for ad-libbing — using a content calendar and automated scheduling tools. For minimal effort, you can provide your ecommerce store with fresh, engaging content that will wow your customers holiday after holiday.
Take a look at my guides and ecommerce blog for even more guidance, tips and advice on how to run a successful online business.
