Summer marketing is the perfect opportunity to refresh your marketing strategy and engage your audience in a fun, memorable way. A summer campaign can be the secret ingredient to boosting your conversion rates, driving sales, and strengthening brand awareness.
By aligning your campaign with popular summer themes and activities, you can tap into these seasonal mindsets and connect with your target audience on a deeper level.
If your brand sells summer-related products or services, then a summer campaign is a no-brainer. It’s an engaging and creative way to promote deals and products to boost sales.
But, if your brand doesn’t have an obvious summer connection, you can still fight the marketing slump that occurs around this time. Email open rates, website traffic, social media hype, and online advertising often see a decline in the summer months, while in-store promotions in strategic and tourist areas do better.So if you’re facing a summer slump or want to promote a seasonal offering, a gamified summer campaign could be the perfect solution to revitalize your marketing strategy.
What comes to mind when you think of summer – warm weather, energy, excitement? This is typically a time of year when people are outdoors, traveling, enjoying sports, festivals, and events, and looking for ways to stay cool and spend their free time.
It’s the perfect opportunity to promote anything related to travel, the great outdoors, open-air events, al fresco dining, and summer-inspired food and drinks. But even if your business doesn’t fit neatly into one of those categories, you can still lean on the summer theme to create a gamified campaign.
Words to inspire these campaigns and promotional branding could include…
Campaigns featuring these themes utilize things that are front of mind during these months, reducing the mental barrier to entry for your audience and more likely to stand out over something generic.
For some businesses, the summer slump is a real problem. When people’s priorities shift and they have more free time, some marketing strategies fall flat.
Email open rates fall or click-through rates on social media drop. We tend to spend less time in front of our computers in the summer, so your strategy may need a tweak.
Here are some ways you can adapt your marketing to suit the season:
Social media: Launching summer campaigns with aesthetically pleasing, summer-related branding can help you stand out on social media. Images of sunshine and summer activities are more likely to resonate and feel familiar to your audience, increasing click-through rates. Using summer-related prizes might also do the trick on social media!
Email marketing: Generally, there’s a decrease in open rates during the summer. But one way to fight against this is by using gamified messaging in emails – again highlighting summer prizes such as tickets to festivals, amusement parks, or summer drinks.
In-store campaigns: If you use QR codes or omnichannel campaigns for in-store promotions, you can take advantage of the summer months when people are visiting stores more often in tourist areas. This will help you balance any decreases in online marketing conversions you might see.
Stay up to date with the weather: Launching a huge online campaign when the weather is hot and sunny might not get you the results you want if your target audience is busy at the beach. Look out for rainy days when people are more likely to see your marketing efforts!
A great example of a summer gamification campaign is Siren Craft Beer, who launched a fun, summer-themed pub quiz. This quiz was mobile-friendly, which was key because it meant that it could be enjoyed on the go (even in the pub!). With a countdown timer for each question, this gave it a sense of urgency and competitiveness, especially when paired with the leaderboard so that players could compare scores. At the end of the quiz, there was an option to retake it, a handy feature that boosted engagement.
A campaign like this was perfect for promoting a summer drink, but it also could be adapted to promote sporting events, attractions, and festivals.
Consumers are more likely to be on the go during the summer months, so your gamified campaigns must be mobile-friendly and responsive. Here’s how:
When building a mobile-friendly gamification campaign, you should also consider the design of the game itself.
For example, if you have a memory game, where users are shown a selection of images and asked to recall them, you will need images that are suitable for smaller screens. A memory test with 50 items may work fine on a desktop but won’t be realistic on mobile.
Summer marketing campaigns can help boost engagement and sales during key summer sporting events such as the EURO2024 as well or also help your brand stand out during quieter periods.
With Playable, many of our clients have utilized our intuitive platform to launch successful summer campaigns using gamification. Try a Playable demo today to learn more.