Many seasonal campaigns fail because they lack strategic marketing planning. This is the conclusion of the coordinator of the Technology courses at Santo Amaro University (Unisa) and a specialist in Marketing strategy for the B2B segment, Rodrigo Médici Cândido.
For the professor, seasonal dates, for retail, can provide increased turnover for stores, but they do not work miracles without a defined goal. “Objectives should be aligned with the business evolution, so the seasonal period can be leveraged to achieve other results, beyond sales themselves, but for this, planning is necessary,” points out Médici.
The coordinator warns of the five most common mistakes made by retail during the seasonal period:
- Lack of planning: a solid business plan is based on consistent audiences, reasonable goals, defined metrics, and real-time monitoring. Planning should be based on previous data, market behavior, and observed trends, so it is important to have a history of goals to base it on.
- Target audience: different dates call for specific audiences. Unlike regular actions, seasonal campaigns require a specific audience, with a different purpose, with specific consumption habits for the period. Although they are composed of the same people, it may seem strange to think so, but it turns out that these people are in a different consumption demand.
- Ignore current trends: times change, and on the internet, it changes even faster. Not being up to date with current trends and not aligning the campaign with the context can lead to a lack of adherence and, consequently, a lack of engagement.
- Poor campaign budget management: allocating resources in unnecessary places can limit the campaign’s efficiency, either by overspending on less efficient channels, or underspending on content production.
- Inadequate evaluation of goals: giving importance to vanity metrics and not focusing on the actual results of the campaign is a common mistake in seasonal dates. Analyzing the real numbers of the campaign only brings benefits, either to measure success to repeat the recipe, or to learn from mistakes and have parameters for fine-tuning corrections in the upcoming seasonal campaigns.
A structured strategic planning can reduce errors, as it provides relevant information about the consumer profile, goal and metric definition, and resource allocation. In case of any inconsistency, the process itself would identify bottlenecks to be corrected through data rather than guesswork.
