Should you stop marketing when its the holidays?

Kind of. There’s your answer if you’re short on time. If you want to know the reasons why, read on. Unless you’re on holiday, then don’t. Or maybe do.

People ask us about this all the time. Unfortunately, for those who like clean-cut answers, it’s one of those marketing best practice questions that’s entirely subjective. Uncovering answers requires you to take a few steps back.

• Who’s your audience?
• What are you marketing?
• How do they consume content?
• And often overlooked, what’s your behaviour with holidays?

Even before delving into these queries, we need to start at the beginning.

What holidays are you talking about?

Do you mean holiday periods where economic activity is more prominent?

Peaks like Black Friday and Cyber Monday are considered shopping ‘holidays’. You certainly wouldn’t be easing off your marketing if you operated in ecommerce. Conversely, if you are in ecommerce technology, you’d leave brands to focus on customers in these critical weeks.

Or, more commonly, do you mean the months when buyers typically take time off work to go away with loved ones – for example, during school closures?

December, July and August are common quiet periods, as are school half terms in the UK.

What if your business operates in the Southern Hemisphere, however? Summer is different in Australia than it is in Germany. Golden Week in Japan is a huge event when the country shuts down, and most of the local population travels around the nation.

What about in markets where holidaying or vacationing isn’t the cultural norm?

And then there’s the other important category of holidays: religious or faith holidays.

Marketers in many regions where we operate tend only to consider the Christian calendar. This isn’t due to ignorance or intolerance but rather the national rhythm of the nations where they are located. Buyer behaviour, as a result, aligns with religious events like Christmas or Easter, and marketers have been trained to tread carefully during those periods.

What type of marketing do you mean?

OK, so you’ve honed in on the type of holiday.

Let’s say we’re referring to the August summer holidays when many people escape to sunnier destinations, and schools give their teachers and pupils a much-deserved break.

It’s time to add more texture to our use case. Let’s say you’re a managed service provider targeting IT directors in the UK.

• Should you be doing any marketing in the middle of August?
• Is it better to hold campaign activation until September when everyone’s back?
• What about PR? Should the vital announcement you have wait?

These questions show the nuance and the importance of considering your audience.

For every IT director sunning themselves on the French Rivera, there’s their opposite revelling in the quieter summer period. They deploy key initiatives, catch up on non-urgent projects, and get a head start on the next financial year.

The best approach is to work channel by channel, carefully considering your audience’s typical behaviour, the marketing metrics you have at your disposal, and the advice of your marketing agency partners.

Here’s what we’d advise for three common marketing channels in our hypothetical situation.

Customer Newsletter

This should always have a set frequency so readers know when your brand will arrive in their inboxes. It doesn’t matter if this is weekly, monthly, quarterly or bi-annually. If the newsletter arrives in August, ensure your August edition sticks close to that day. You naturally have some wiggle room, but a gap that is too long looks unprofessional and upsets the cadence of future newsletters.

LinkedIn Marketing

Everyone uses social media differently. Some people abandon their phones in a drawer when taking a break, while others stay plugged in. Someone who’s part-disconnected while on holiday may take more notice of your LinkedIn marketing than if they were in the office. Keep this channel going, as everyone takes holidays differently.

PR Announcement

This one divides marketers and PR pros all the time. Journalists do quieten down in summer and Christmas, but there will always be a reporter holding the fort. Often, because many companies think holiday periods are a no-go for announcing news, the competition for coverage is far less intense, and your campaign could see a better-than-usual response. We have seen this from experience.

Deciding what to do comes down to the basics of PR:

• Is the story newsworthy?
• How does the target media operate?
• What value are you adding, or are you just communicating for the sake of it?

You need to answer those first.

Are you asking the right questions?

As you’ll have seen, there are near-limitless questions and angles to consider for every piece of content, campaign, holiday, audience, region and marketing objective.

This can be massively overwhelming, and the sheer magnitude of the task is one of the many reasons why B2B technology marketers turn to Bamboo for help.

We have decades of experience understanding the nuances and particularities of markets so your brand can make the maximum impact with the right audience at the right time.

Brilliant marketing is all about momentum, and just because the world quietens at certain times of the year shouldn’t mean you need to pull down the shutters and shut up shop.

Contact us today to eliminate the overwhelm and make the most of those holiday periods.