Leverage Social Media Seasonal Trends to Drive Sales & Stay Relevant Year-Round
When it comes to marketing your business and your brand on social media, there’s a time and a season for everything. Aligning your social content with specific seasons and seasonal trends can make your posts more relevant and bring even more attention to your business. Consider the following social media seasonal trends to maximize social media marketing for your dealership.
- How Seasonality Impacts Social Media Content
- The Temptation to Turn Down Social Ads During Slow Seasons
- A Time & Season to Evaluate Your Social Media
- Seasonal Social Media Strategies
- The Seasons of Social Media Marketing
How Seasonality Impacts Social Media Content
It’s no secret that the outdoors has a big impact on your industry. Your audiences’ interests naturally change from season to season, depending on the conditions and accessibility of the great outdoors.
Your social media marketing should embrace these changes and use them to your advantage to bring more attention to your business. By aligning your social posts and campaigns with the current temperature of your audience (and the outdoors), you can take advantage of the excitement and natural enthusiasm that comes with changing seasons and leverage social media to bring in more interested buyers.
Perhaps even more importantly, embracing the seasonality of social media marketing can help you to maintain a consistent social media presence during slow seasons. Staying active on social media year-round keeps your brand visible and top of mind for shoppers, even if they aren’t actively buying. After all, modern consumers never leave the digital path to purchase. With the rise of online shopping and nonstop advertisements, they’re always considering their next purchase, maintenance or repair, even if they don’t plan to pull the trigger until the season changes.
While seasonality doesn't necessarily impact everyone—dealers in steady climates can focus on more consistent campaigns throughout the year—it can help you to generate relevant, timely posts that reach more interested social media shoppers. It also shows that your dealership isn’t stagnant. When you change with the times and seasons, consumers won’t pigeonhole you into providing offerings for only a specific niche category.
The Temptation to Turn Down Social Ads During Slow Seasons
At first blush, spending less on social media marketing during slow seasons might makes sense. Your would-be customers are seemingly less willing to buy, so why should you spend time and money on organic and paid social media content?
Many small to mid-sized dealerships without big-dealership budgets often slow or pause their ads during slow seasons to conserve funds. While this understandable seasonal reaction might save some time and money in the short-term, it can also cost your dealership in lost opportunities to engage with your audience and build brand recognition that will pay off when shoppers are ready to buy.
It also reduces the digital competition for those dealerships that do decide to keep running ads during the slow seasons. Your lack of social media presence removes competition and gives their ads a better chance of performing during the busy season, since they've had time to build traction and gain an audience.
In other words, the slow season is the perfect season to make your mark and move ahead of your competition, who may be letting their guard down by deciding not to advertise. By putting in the work during the slow season, you can get a leg up on your competition when the weather turns warmer and the rubber hits the dirt road, so to speak.
Especially on platforms like social media, where consumers are active year-round, your presence and your paid ads can grow your impressions and market share when other dealers are taking time off.
A Time & Season to Evaluate Your Social Media
Your slow season is the perfect time to analyze and re-evaluate your social media campaign. Take the time to look back at the last several months (and even the previous year) to determine which months and types of content got the most engagement. Take notice of which types of posts and ads performed the best, and whether your audience has grown or stayed the same.
This is a great time to identify areas of improvement and potential opportunities to try new things. Consider running A/B tests on ad types. You can also analyze what type of consumers have interacted the most with your recent posts and ads, so you can optimize your campaigns and better appeal to your target audience.
The slow season is also an idea time to plan out your content for the year. When you’re in the thick of the busy season, you may not have time to brainstorm and create new content each week. However, you certainly don’t want to neglect your social media presence during the sales season, as this is a period of peak engagement with your shoppers. Use your down time to plan out and preschedule content so that when business picks up again, you aren’t stretched thin and wracking your brain for new social media ideas.
Finally, think about your goals for the upcoming year. How many units do you want to sell? Are you posting your listings on your social media pages? What type of consumer do you want to target and bring into your dealership? Are you targeting specific audiences through your paid ads? Your social media strategy should also support your sales and business goals throughout the year.
Social Media Strategies to Overcome Seasonality
As the weather changes from warm to winter and back to warm again, take advantage of the unique opportunities to adapt your marketing tactics to better connect with your target audience.
You can transform so-called slow seasons into opportunities to drive sales and generate interest in your dealership. Implement the following social media tactics to and overcome the seasonal effects that many dealerships experience during certain months of the year.
Create Seasonal Campaigns
Take advantage of holidays and trade shows and leverage social media to promote your offerings. Invent your own industry event and generate interest on your social media channels by showcasing your inventory and offering off-season discounts that shoppers can’t ignore.
Timing of Content
In areas of both warm and cold seasons, your content creation should change with the seasons. During peak seasons, such as summer or winter, customers are more likely to engage with content that is relevant to their current interests. By promoting certain products or services that align with the season, such as snowmobiles or snow blowers in the winter and motorcycles or lawnmowers in the summer, you can take advantage of the current consumer interests.
During slower seasons, you may choose give consumers additional reasons to buy from you. You can use your social media channels to attract potential buyers in the off seasons by offering them a great deal on a unit or accessory. Stress the limited-time nature of your offers to spark interest in buying now. You may also choose to advertise other offerings too, such as clothing, accessories, maintenance and repair, and promoting gift cards.
If you have inventory that’s been sitting on your lot for a while, you may consider extending your year-end sales or running a blowout sale on last year’s models. You can run ads as well as post organic links to specific website inventory listings.
In general, ads need time to build and draw an audience. It’s important to reserve some ad spend for the slow months to build a brand presence and anticipation for the impending business boom. If you wait until the sales season is hot to start advertising on social media, it may be too late to capture your audience’s attention.
During the busy season, on the other hand, you may not feel like they you have the time to post. Working with a social media vendor or having a posting tool allows them to schedule organic posts in advance. If you aren't in a position to outsource to a vendor, you may consider hiring a family member, college student or intern part-time to run social media during the busy seasons to keep your content fresh in the minds of consumers year-round.
This will help you to have someone dedicated to responding to comments and DMs, as consumers want a response within 24 hours. Consumers can also leave reviews on platforms like Facebook, so it's important to respond quickly to both positive and negative reviews.
Type of Content
Seasonal trends can influence the type of content you share on social media. During summer months when people are more likely to be outdoors and active, your dealership may want to focus on sharing exciting and brand-building content, such as customer testimonials from summer road trips.
In contrast, during winter months when people are more likely to be indoors and looking for entertainment, you may want to focus on sharing informative and entertaining content, such as tips for winterizing vehicles or showcasing off-road adventures in the snow.
Organic social media, including educational content and behind the scenes looks at your dealership, is a great way to build rapport with shoppers during sales slumps. The holiday season is also the perfect time to generate interest in your offerings through the use of gift guides. This gives your audience a reason to get excited for warmer times ahead by pursuing products in your gift guide or similar content marketing.
This can build anticipation and attract shoppers months before most people hit the stores. Be sure to include information about your listings, accessories, apparel and gear. Include details about special offers that your customers can take advantage of during the winter months.
You can also use social media to stay on top of seasonal trends in your specific industry. For example, you may want to keep an eye on popular events and conventions happening during certain seasons, such as trade shows, and use social media to promote your presence at these events.
Share User-Generated Content
Keep your brand top of mind during slower seasons by interacting with followers through their comments and direct messages. This is a great way to keep your audience engaged with your dealership year-round. After all, your consumer base is active year-round on social media. Shouldn’t you be too?
Encourage customers to post a review of their experience at your dealership so you can (with their permission) reshare their message on your own page. You can also ask customers at your dealership if they’d consent to having their photo taken with their new purchase so you can give them a shout out online.
You can also convert your customers into your greatest brand ambassadors. Offer incentives to like and share your content to grow your audience. Engage with your customer base by posting content that invites them to be part of your community. Encourage involvement and responses on social media. Offer incentives and interesting content that drives them to your website. And highlight customers and their units year-round to keep people interested in your offerings.
Leverage Paid Ads
Paid advertising on social media can complement your organic content and help your dealership gain visibility and attract new customers. Rather than delivering general brand messages meant for your entire audience base, paid ads allow you to segment your audience and target individual consumers.
Once you’ve segmented your audience by age, behaviors, interests and other demographics, you can implement different paid campaigns on different social media platforms to ensure that your ads are always highly effective. You can also analyze the results at the end of each month to see how you can make adjustments to bring in the most buyers, even during non-peak seasons.
Partnering with a social media vendor is a great way to get the most out of your campaigns, reach the right audience members and drive sales during otherwise slow seasons.
Share Season-Appropriate Educational Content
If you live in a region that experiences cold and heat, winter is the perfect time of year for upkeep. During the downtime, give your customers the resources they need to keep their units in peak condition and prepare for the upcoming spring weather. If you offer service, give your customers discounts and incentives to bring in their units for maintenance, repair and service. If you don’t, give them educational resources to winterize and keep their units in tip-top condition for the long months ahead.
Take Advantage of Tax Season
Tax season is a great opportunity to invite shoppers to use their tax returns on a unit or part purchase. It also happens to appear in the calendar year at the tail end of the winter months and just before peak shopping season. In fact, many consumers will file their taxes early to get their returns sooner. Take advantage of this time and your audience’s influx of funds to run organic and paid ads, as consumers are likely to have recovered from the holiday spending and have a little more cash in their pockets.
Make Your Content Engaging & Personable
Marketing your dealership is more than just promoting the products or services you offer. It's about creating a connection with your audience, understanding their interests and emotions, and engaging them in meaningful conversation.
Don't just promote your products or services all the time. Instead, focus on creating posts that encourage your followers to interact with you by liking, commenting and sharing. This type of engagement is free and can significantly increase your reach and visibility on social media.
One way to do this is by posting memes and polls that are related to your industry or the current season. For instance, you can ask your followers about their plans for summer vacations or what they do to beat the winter blues.
But coming up with engaging content can be challenging at times. This is where you can outsource ideas from your family and friends. They can provide a fresh perspective and help you come up with funny, relevant jokes and memes that will appeal to your audience.
The Seasons of Social Media Marketing
Social media is one of the best ways to interact directly with your audience, but your paid and organic social content will be most effective when you change with the seasons and implement the right seasonal social media strategies. By leaning into seasonal trends and being willing to stay active when other dealers slow down, you can leverage the times and seasons of social media to engage with your audience, generate interest, drive sales and stay relevant year-round.