Autumn is well known as being the season of change. From the leaves on the ground to the chill in the air, the transition from summer to autumn comes overnight. But what does that mean for your brand and your marketing campaign? Well, your audience isn’t going to be in the mood for sun-kissed grand adventures or beach days now that they are back to reality and the confines of their desks. Navigating your autumn marketing campaign in between the hangover of summer and the looming feel of the festive season can sometimes be tricky to nail down. There can often be a sense of ambiguity over just how to use autumn to your advantage. Do you want to depress your audience by swapping out the sun cream for the scarves and umbrellas? How soon is too soon to go full throttle with your Christmas campaign (FYI…there’s no such thing as too soon in marketing)? Thankfully for you though, there’s still plenty of potential to get the best out of Autumn. Here’s how…
As the season's change and special holidays and occasions creep up, marketers can use this as a dream opportunity to leverage these occasions to connect more with audiences. So, whilst the tree may not go up and the jumpers might not come out till December (or the end of November if you’re really keen), there is still plenty of time to start pushing Christmas long before you open your first advent calendar door. The truth is, your Christmas marketing strategy should be ready and waiting by now, but Autumn gives you the ideal window to air out any concerns among the team, iron over any changes you want to make and ensure everything is in the best place to get the most mileage out of all your seasonal marketing and content.
It's not all about Christmas though. Whether it’s Thanksgiving or Diwali, there are plenty of opportunities for you to integrate holidays and occasions into your autumn marketing strategy to create exciting seasonal content, no matter who your audience is or where in the world you’re targeting them. And the opportunities don’t come much bigger than Halloween… Some of the biggest brands across the world switch up their marketing to get spooky for the 31st of October, creating new visuals and messaging – and even new products – to appeal to those who like the scarier things in life. Halloween offers such a fantastic opportunity to have a bit of fun and really get creative incorporating all the aesthetics and visuals of the holiday from pumpkins, ghosts and ghouls to skulls and skeletons. You can never have too much so trust us, throw them all in.
Whilst the creepy aesthetics of Halloween and the more spirited feel of the impending festivities give you plenty of creative licence to craft visuals and marketing materials that scare and delight in equal measure, the rest of autumn gives your graphic team plenty to work with. The arrival of the crisp weather and the familiarity of your old knitwear that comes with autumn opens up a new playbook to use, one where you can switch things up and keep your visuals fresh and exciting with a different kind of marketing design. Your graphics team can look around them as a rich source of inspiration to create cosy designs that reflect the earthy colour palette and the natural feel of the autumn weather. Think less pool lilo’s and cocktails, more blankets and hot coffee. Creating a warm and relevant visual cache for autumn and making use of familiar seasonal visuals will help generate plenty of interest that will help build positive emotions about your brand, keeping it nice and warm even as the weather gets a little colder.
The seasons change, but the constant flurry of content never does, and autumn is no different. Your content throughout autumn is your opportunity to take all the holidays and events, and your new visuals to put together a clear plan on the messaging you will be sending out. Including everything autumn into your copy will of course make your ads, and your brand, more relatable. Your audience will be going all-in on their freshest knitwear, chilly autumn walks, pumpkin spiced latte’s, and binge-watching horror movies on Netflix, so don’t be afraid to integrate these things into your content and messaging. As your audiences routines and actions change, they’ll all be exposed to different foods, colours, and messaging, which makes it perfect to replicate this whether on the high street or online through your targeted ads or social media.
We’ve already gone into detail about the importance of using holidays like Halloween in your autumn marketing strategy but it’s just as important to look at how or why you'd use them. Perhaps you’ve got some content anchors that are synonymous with your brand like recipe tips or days out ideas, adding a seasonal spin about Halloween recipes or local pumpkin patches to these anchors is an incredibly effective and relevant way to use the holidays to your advantage. Honouring the holidays are great, but it needs to be relevant. If your audience doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving or Diwali, then why mention them? Instead, look around and see what else you can push that is relevant to your audience to create the very best content your brand is capable of producing. Lifestyle and fashion brand? Then let's focus on the very best of fall fashion. Tourism company? Advocate for fantastic local walks that are made for the autumn season.
