Weekly Campaign Idea: Summer Promotion

Seasonal marketing is a powerful way to leverage some of the biggest spending and engagement times of the year.

While the top seasonal marketing periods are Mother's Day, Easter, Halloween, Christmas and New Years, there is still value in running promotions that align with winter, spring, summer and fall.If you're having trouble coming up with a theme or compelling prize for your next promotion, try capitalizing on the current or upcoming season. Why does this matter? Essentially, people aren't excited about winning a sweater in the middle of July (unless you're in Australia or New Zealand, of course!) Plus, summertime means school breaks, fun activities and travel. If your promotion can play off of the things people love to do during the summer, you'll most likely have more success.

Here are 4 things to remember when building a summer promotion

1. Make it ongoing: Summertime is the perfect time to run a long promotion. If you can afford to feature multiple prizes, do it now. We recommend having an ongoing promotion where the prize changes every few weeks. This will keep your audience engaged throughout the summer.

‍2. Keep it seasonal: You'd be surprised how often we see a summer promotion where the prize is something that can't be used until winter. The prize is the main attraction for your fans so make sure it's seasonal, or something they would want all year long. If your company doesn't have any seasonal products try adding in a little extra "summery" gift such as a gift card to a local yogurt shop or some beach items.

‍3. Keep mobile in mind: As we've mentioned before, summer means people are on the go! This means your campaign has to be mobile friendly. Fortunately, if you build with ShortStack your campaign will always be mobile friendly, but there are still some design best practices to keep in mind so all of your fans can easily access and enter your promotion.

‍4. Make it fun: I don't know about you, but when I think about summer I think free time and relaxation! Businesses can play off of these feelings in their promotions, just like Artrageous with Nate did in this week's campaign example. For Artrageous's campaign, they're asking their fans to submit some original artwork in exchange for a chance to win some awesome art supplies. Normally, asking fans to submit original art might be a daunting task, especially since their audience is middle- and high-school-aged students. However, Artrageous has positioned their competition as a "summer break" contest, so students have more free time and are excited to continue to create art even though they're not in school.

Example of a summer promotion

Artrageous with Nate is an Emmy-award winning video series that educates and inspires creativity in middle- and high-school aged students. Their Summer Art Contest hosts a new contest every two weeks and keeps kids involved in the arts even when they're on summer break. Every two weeks, Artrageous changes the header image on their campaign to represent that contest's prize. The campaign is embedded on the homepage of their website as well as on their Facebook Page.