June 24, 2016 rockorange

Summer’s Here. Time to Lighten Up Your Marketing.

Summer – a time to strip down, lighten up and have some fun. With the longer days and rising temperatures comes a sense of renewed energy and a tendency towards the whimsical. Heavy soups and stews are replaced by summer salads and outside BBQs, weekends spent binging on TV shows are replaced with trips to the beach; hemlines are on the rise and the possibility of a summer romance is around every corner.

A lesser-known summer side effect is that when the sun is out, people spend more. Research suggests that the sun makes us feel better and, in turn, according to these findings, shop more.

For marketers looking to capitalize on this sunshine-induced positive consumer attitude, lightening up their campaigns to match the season is a must. Here are three ways to do it.

  1. Make it fun

Summer is all about having fun, and that should translate into summer-focused marketing campaigns. From using elements of gamification to spark competitiveness, to boosting engagement with loyalty programs, to viral marketing, making campaigns fun means making them engaging. That’s why Snapchat has overtaken Twitter in daily users. The fun factor is significantly higher with its array of filters and, like a summer romance, is non-committal by the nature of its time-limited posts.

  1. A picture’s worth a thousand words

As Apple introduces its new emojification feature, where users will be offered up emoji’s as alternate suggestions to typed words, and Twitter announces the ability to target ads based on emoji’s, the power of the written word is diminishing. That means marketers need to be more visual than ever with their messages and campaigns. And if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth 10-times as much. According to a report published by Forrester, including video in an email leads to a whopping 200-300 percent increase in click-through rate. And 45.4 percent of users viewed at least one video online over the course of a month according to ComScore.

  1. Get mobile

This is the time of year marketers should be directing even more of their attention to mobile. As consumers head outside and away from home, marketers must reach them in the mobile-moment wherever they are – and mobile is the best channel to do that. But the key to mobile marketing is relevance – getting the right content to the right customer at the right time will drive action. The easiest way to be relevant is through location. Understanding where a customer is in relation to your product is the best way to understand where and when to target consumers. Remember, all that sunshine makes them want to spend more – so it’s just a matter of ensuring your brand is top of mind when they make that in-the-moment purchase.

This summer, make sure your marketing matches your customers’ season. Make it fun, make it visual and make it mobile. Just remember, summer may only be one season, but the memories last a lifetime. Make sure your marketing is memorable to match.

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