How to Market Your School Store Products with Seasonal & Holiday Promotions: Part 1
By: Aria Spears
Seasonal advertising and promotions can help you sell more products by keeping your store top-of-mind and relevant to your customers’ day-to-day life. In this article, you’ll learn about the basics of what it means to implement season and holiday promotions, how to create your plan, and how to keep learning for future years’ sales.
Has your Spirit Box team implemented seasonal sales? What was your most successful promotion? Let us know!
Seasonal & holiday promotions help you build upon the buzz.
Seasonal and holiday promotions incorporate seasonal and holiday-related themes into advertising for goods, products and services. Building in seasonal and holiday promotions can help you take advantage of pre-established public awareness and themes already happening to help keep your brand top-of-mind.
Some of the top holidays in the U.S. market include:
New Year’s Day
Valentine’s Day
St. Patrick’s Day
Easter
Fourth of July - Independence Day
Labor Day
Halloween
Thanksgiving / Black Friday / Cyber Monday
Christmas
And more
You might also consider important monthly themes:
Black History Month
Hispanic Heritage Month
Women’s History Month
And more
Other important holidays and events at your school might include:
Mother’s Day
Father’s Day
Graduation Day
First Day of School
Earth Day
Flu season
Mardi Gras
Spring Break
Finals or Midterms week
Sports competitions and finals
In addition, depending upon where you live, you could also incorporate elements of the changing seasons into your campaign. Perhaps your area experiences all four seasons, summer, fall, winter and spring. Or perhaps your area has fewer seasons such as “rainy” and “dry”. Whatever the seasonal changes, your promotions could provide customers with the products and services they need to help them stay happy, healthy and safe.
Incorporate all elements of a seasonal promotion plan.
Planning your promotions around holidays and seasons can provide great structure for your marketing efforts throughout the year. Creating a plan ahead of time also will help to spark creativity in the team’s approach by creating fresh opportunities for connecting your store to opportunities, new products and events through the year. Below you will find the basic elements of a holiday and seasonal promotion. You can create your calendar for the year, and then answer these questions for each holiday.
Calendar - What seasons and events are you going to highlight?
First, lay out all of the holidays you and your team think you’d like to incorporate into your plan. From there, you can then fill in any gaps with seasonal promotions for down times. Your town may go all out in celebrating a uniquely local holiday, or perhaps your school always hosts a big event for Halloween. Your team’s calendar will likely be somewhat different from other schools, simply because your town or city’s traditions will be different.
The format your team takes may also differ from another team. Maybe you want to write them all on a big calendar for the whole team to see, or perhaps you prefer to type them into a spreadsheet where you can track all of the details in one place. Maybe your team prefers a mix of both.
Action Step: Here you can find a list of 2023 holidays listed by quarter. You won’t likely use every holiday (that would be a LOT!), but you can decide which holidays would be most relevant to your school’s customers. Choose which holidays are relevant for your school.
Events - What events will be happening at the school that would be relevant to these segments?
Your school may or may not be open on the actual holiday, and students may celebrate before or after it actually happens. School holiday parties are great examples, as many students celebrate early and then are on break during the actual public holidays. What school events will be occurring near to these events that might bring in extra foot traffic? Are families attending one holiday event?
Action Step: Make sure you get a school calendar and are aware of these additional opportunities before, during and after the actual holidays.
Customers - What are the different customer segments you will be speaking to at each holiday or season?
You likely know that not everyone who stops by your Spirit Box will be interested in the same kinds of products. When you consider all of the people who may regularly pass the Spirit Box, it could include teachers, students of different ages and grades, parents, other school staff and more. Each of these different groups could represent a different customer segment.
Segmenting out your customers is important so you know what kinds of messages to bring to different groups. For example, for Mother’s Day, you would likely create messaging for students that is very different from the messaging for teachers and parents.
Action Step: List out your customer segments. As you work through the plan for each holiday, ask your team about how each segment should (or maybe shouldn't) be incorporated into promotions.
Experience - What are each of these customers thinking about, stressing over or hoping for during this holiday or season?
Once you identify the specific customer segments for the holiday of focus, then you can consider what kinds of things will be on their minds at this time. It could be as tangible as recognizing that as fall changes into winter, sometimes people might forget their coats and feel cold while at school. Or it could be as subjective as feeling stressed about their upcoming finals or unsure of whether to get their friends small holiday gifts.
You’ve likely already done some of this research and thinking from past Spirit Box years, but if not, you can always talk to customers to gauge their thoughts about the different holidays. You won’t be selling anything in the conversation, just listening for their ideas.
Action Step: For your holiday of focus, for each relevant customer segment, take some notes about what they might be thinking, experiencing or feeling. This will help you develop messaging later on.