Seasonal Marketing Campaigns 2: Fulfill a Successful Seasonal Campaign

This continues our series on successful seasonal marketing campaigns for your business

Once you recognize your seasonal campaigns and needs, you need to prepare to fulfill your increased orders, sales, and deliveries. That means ordering more supplies and raw material. It also means either hiring additional staff or paying your current staff for overtime. Seasonal increases require planning and preparation.

Techniques to Plan for Seasonal Fulfillment

Some advice for fulfilling your seasonal purchasing, producing, and shipping:

• Forecast what you need
  • Analyze your orders, sales, & production for at least four years to forecast this year
  • Compare stats on competitive products, services, shippers, raw materials, & more
  • Consider any new products, new services, new marketing campaigns or sales efforts
• Increase capacity to
  • Notify suppliers, vendors, and shippers of projected increases
  • Many industries earn 40-80% of revenues during seasonal sales. They start stockpiling material and product throughout the year
  • Hire temporary employees from staffing services, monitor their performance. Hire the best to fill full-time openings throughout the year
  • Plan your shipping through drop shippers, commercial carriers, or others
  • Many companies now offer free shipping on seasonal activities and sales
• Test your digital sales and order systems
  • Online businesses need to ensure they have enough memory for Cyber Monday
  • Run tests on the user interface, payment processing, and auto-drop shipments before Cyber Monday

Surviving a Seasonal Businesses

Sarah Pierce at Entrepreneur offered the following advice to Surviving a Seasonal Business:

• Be financially disciplined
• Make the most of your peak season
• Maximize your time during the off-season
• Start a complementary seasonal business

More Information

You can find more information at the following:

• In Fifth Gear’s 3 Tips for Holiday Sales Forecasting
• Prospect Stream’s case study on HoneyBaked Ham Co.
• Marketing Savant’s Marketing Through the Seasons
• Fourth Source shares this for digital marketing Seasonal Marketing—using data and insight to create campaigns that work
• BDC Canada suggest Forecasting production for seasonal manufacturing
• PBS did a series on Seasonal Manufacturing
• eNotes’ excellent article Seasonal Businesses
• Monster’s article on Make Seasonal Hiring Easier and More Efficient

Join us Saturday to learn about cross-promoting your seasonal campaigns with others