Fall is right around the corner. The leaves will start changing and falling and the nights are getting colder and colder. It’s almost the perfect time to get a hot cup of cocoa, some big wooly socks, and run a Fall marketing campaign.
This article will give you a super easy step-by-step walkthrough for creating a successful Fall marketing campaign from beginning to end. We’ll break down each step of the process and include some great ideas you can use if it suits you!
Let’s get started!
Step 1: Brainstorm your Fall Campaign
The first thing you need to do is determine what kind of Fall marketing campaign you want to run – a simple sale, a photo contest, a giveaway, a discount, or whatever your creative mind can come up with.
But before we get into that, let’s check out a few top ideas for Fall marketing campaigns:
- Enter for a chance to win a $200 gift certificate for your Thanksgiving feast!
- Submit your Fall photo. Whichever gets the most votes wins [your prize]
- Send us your best Halloween costume and win a Spooky Prize Package!
- Fall family photo shoot
- Now until November 31st, get 25%-off (insert here)!
- Subscribe Here to Get Early Access to our Black Friday Deals!
The real limitations here are your creativity. Every industry (including B2B and SaaS) can find a way to work a seasonal promotion into their marketing strategy. If you’re looking for ideas, reach out in the comment section and we’d be happy to brainstorm with you!
Step 2: Create a Fall Campaign Page
Once you know what Fall campaign you’re going to run, you need to create a specific page within your website which is focused on that campaign.
Having a specific page for your campaign will result in better conversion rates (because your traffic is more focused on a single goal), make it easier to run ads, and make it easier for you to track the success of your campaign.
The important parts of this Fall marketing campaign:
- The dollar value of the promotion, front and center
- The countdown timer, to create urgency in your campaign page visitors
- “Enter for a chance to win” – legally, this is important. You can’t, technically, use “enter to win” in your contest copy
- Limited form fields (name and email address, usually). Anything more will drop conversion rates, anything else and you won’t know enough about your leads to contact them
- A single call-to-action. Any links which drive your campaign page visitors off this page (such as a Nav bar or footer) will drop conversion rates. Your campaign page should have a single focus.
- The “share to get bonus entry” fields.
Step 3: Drive Traffic from your Website and Subscribers
The easiest way to drive traffic to your most Fall marketing campaign is to notify your existing subscriber and contacts.
After all, these are people who you know are interested in your products or platform. Whether they’re existing customers, previous customers or blog subscribers doesn’t matter. They have already been convinced of some element of the value of your company.
Now, the goal of your Fall marketing campaign is probably to get new business leads or customers, not drive existing customers back to get more discounts (though retention is never a bad idea when it comes to digital marketing)…
But your existing customers have friends. So, send an email to our existing customers anyway.
And then send an email to your previous campaign’s entrants as well (because you know those people aren’t just interested in your product, but also in winning that product).
Set your newsletter conditions, set your newsletter setup, then it’s just a matter of writing your email and including a link to your campaign page.
But we’re not done yet.
The second-easiest way to drive traffic to your campaign is to send it from your highest-traffic pages. For instance, if your homepage, high-SEO article, or product pages get the most website visitors, add a welcome mat to notify everyone who comes through about your campaign.
Step 4: Drive Traffic with Referrals
A great way for you to drive traffic to your campaign is with the bonus entry options within the fom there in the middle of the campaign.
How do bonus entries work?
It’s relatively simple to drive your existing contacts to your campaign. And, as I said, your contacts have friends. So, all we need to do is make it easy for our existing contacts to tell all their friends.
The bonus entry tool incentivizes your contest entrants (subscribers usually, at least at the beginning) to share with their friends in order to get additional chances to win. A Tweet will get you one additional entry, a Google+ share the same and whatever your primary goal of the campaign (like submission of a phone number or a Follow on Instagram) can give 5 or 10 additional entries.
Of course the benefit of a bonus entry feature doesn’t just end with your existing subscribers (though it does help your campaign get off the ground and grow organically). As every new person enters your campaign, they’re given the same incentive to share.
Step 5: Drive Traffic through Online Advertising
Facebook Ads, dollar for dollar, can give you a better return on investment than trying to promote your Fall campaign organically.
You could spend every minute of every day trying to push people to your campaign and never reach even half the number you can with an affordable ad budget and half an hour of work.
Here’s a step-by-step walkthrough for building the Facebook Ad campaign for our “Fall Photo-shoot” campaign (you’ll need a Facebook Business Manager account, by the way):
Step 1: Choose your Facebook Ad goal.
- Our recommendation for this would be “Traffic,” though if you have the technical savvy to install the Facebook conversion tracking pixel to your website, that’s even better.
Step 2: Choose your Facebook Ad location targeting.
Step 3: Choose your Facebook Ad Demographic targeting.
Step 4: Choose your Budget.
Step 5: Adjust your Budget and Audience Targeting to Get the Right Estimated Clicks.
For a business with an average order value of $50, you’ll be fine to set a budget of $20/day, as this will drive enough new leads through your campaign that it will be profitable. Remember the ol’ ROI equation:
(Average Order Value x # of Converted Leads) – Campaign Spend / Campaign Spend = Return on Investment
Top Tip: Google Drawing makes it really easy to create an optimized Facebook Ad image. Go to “File > Page Setup” to make your page size 1200 x 628, drag in the same image you used for your campaign background, add a semi-transparent black overlay and use the same headline and font you used on your campaign page. Go to “File > Download As” to export the drawing as a PNG. Easy as that!
Step 6: Turn your Fall Leads into Customers with Email.
Once your campaign is over and you’ve announced your grand prize winner, you’ll have a bunch of new business leads who are extremely warm and, with a well-placed push, likely to buy.
Our recommendation is to create an email drip campaign to act as a net, ensuring you catch as many of your new leads as possible.
Here’s how to do it…
Step 1: Write four emails:
You should be able to tell what each one of these emails is from the subject lines. If you want clarification, let me know in the comment section.
“Fall Photoshoot Winner Announced (With Commiseration Prize!)”
Notify all your contest entrants of a limited-time discount code or credit exclusively available to them.
- “48 Hours Left to Take Advantage of Our [%-off] Discount!”
- “24 Hours Left to Take Advantage of Our [%-off] Discount!”
- “Special offer: Contact Me to Get an Exclusive Discount”
Step 2: Set your Automated Drip Campaign Conditions.
Step 3: Set your Automated Drip Campaign Actions (the Emails).
Step 4: Segment.
Be sure to add all your Fall marketing campaign leads into a segmented list. This will make it far easier to send them follow-up emails down the line.
This is especially valuable if you’re running a campaign which gives away a specific product. The next time you’re running a promotion on that product (or something related to it), be sure to notify your contest entrants specifically, as you know they’re interested in it.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully this article has given you a better idea of how to start with a Fall marketing campaign. It’s a great time of year for a promotion, and it shouldn’t take you more than an afternoon to get one launched.
Have any questions? Don’t hesitate to reach out in the comment section or, if you want to talk about how you can better market your business, give us a call or visit our website by clicking here!