How Seasonality Impacts Digital

How seasonality impacts digital

Each year, CMOs and business owners plan out their yearly marketing budgets and campaigns to maximise brand awareness, increase revenue, and grow their business.

However, one thing most people overlook is how seasonality impacts business, and especially how it impacts business in digital. Not being aware of how seasonality impacts your business means you are being less efficient with your marketing spend while also missing out on growth opportunities.

We all know the demand for flowers is highest around Valentine's Day and searches for snowboarding drastically improve in winter. But what tools and techniques can someone use to inform seasonality in their own business?

How do you find digital seasonality?

Google Analytics - The best place to start is to look at your own Google Analytics data, look at web traffic or revenue over the past few years and see if there are trends emerging that look seasonal. No doubt you will begin to see that certain months or periods of the year are increasing or decreasing where you haven’t had big marketing campaigns in play.

Google Trends - Google Trends is a free tool that lets you search interest in brands, topics, or industries over time. Compare your brand against your competitors and see when interest spikes. Do the same with topics associated with your business and then compare this with the trends you discovered inside Google Analytics to further inform your seasonality strategy.

Sales Data - The other place to look is at your internal sales data, does the graph line up with the other two tools above? If so, you will be starting to piece the puzzle together.

How often should I check digital seasonality?

Seasonality in business and in digital should in theory stay the same each year, so you only need to complete seasonality annually when creating your yearly marketing plan. Over time you can expand on this making it more intelligent, using seasonality to help forecast and predict revenue.

What do you do with the data and insights you find?

Having data that tells you which month or season your brand or industry is most likely to be high in sales is extremely useful. It will allow you to forecast when sales should be higher therefore the need to have more staff on, help manage cash flow, or find opportunities when you should be doing more marketing activity because the demand for your industry is higher.

Seasonality is also increasingly useful in digital marketing. It will tell you when to increase budgets and bids, and also when to decrease them, in turn increasing conversion rates as well as online revenue.

Summary

In summary, using seasonality data and drawing insights from it will make your business smarter, more profitable, and more efficient over time. There is a range of techniques and tools that are available to everyone to inform your strategy.