3 Ways to Get your Brand Seen this Winter

“Winter is coming.” It’s a motto from the popular Game of Thrones series, but it’s also a helpful reminder to think about your seasonal marketing plan. Marketing your brand is a year-round job, yet the winter months can prove quite the challenge as people hide away from the cold, offices close down for the holidays and work generally slows down. However, there are several creative, yet practical ways to get your brand seen during the chilly months by tapping into a few seasonal marketing strategies. In this post, we share three such ways to get your brand noticed this winter, and beyond. 

Leverage the Shopping Season

The festive season is a great time to promote your brand as people are out and about shopping for gifts for loved ones. In fact, during this time of year, shoppers in the UK spend over £2 billion! Consider tempting these customers with special discounts to get them in-store and familiar with your brand in time for the holiday shopping season. For example, you might offer a special gift with every purchase or run a buy-one-get-one-free promotion on a number of popular items. 

Tap into some common winter themes with your marketing strategy, including scenes and messages around warmth, coziness, love, and spending time with friends and family. You might position how your product or service will help your customers achieve these nostalgic feelings – perhaps you sell a special branded thermal bag to keep warm winter foods hot when traveling to holiday parties and family events. Or maybe you gift a branded, winter-scented candle with the purchase of another product or service. 

Another winter-ready idea is to create branded shopping bags and hand them out on the high street for maximum visibility. We offer a range of durable, yet low-cost cotton shopper bags that are an ideal choice for any sort of retail giveaway. This Ningbo cotton shopping tote bag, for example, features a clean design, zippered main compartment, sturdy handles for lots of holiday shopping and plenty of space to feature your brand and message. It’s also a perfect alternative to disposable plastic bags.

This brings up another idea to appeal to your eco-conscious customers this winter. Over the holiday season, UK shoppers unfortunately produce 30 percent more waste than during other periods of time. Reusable bags like above, or items made from environmentally friendly materials in general, will help your customers do their part to reduce holiday waste.

Host a Contest

During the winter, people tend to have a bit more time away from the office. It’s the perfect moment to capture their attention on social media, when there’s less noise and distraction from work, travel and outdoor activities. Take a few moments to update your social media information and add fresh photos and content. Then, consider hosting a social media contest over the winter, where you can ask people to like, share or comment on a post, or enter to win a giveaway. Perhaps you ask your followers to share their favorite (or least favorite) thing about the winter. Branded tote bags, badges, and keyrings are all great giveaway options for these types of contests. You could also offer gift certificates to a movie theater or a hearty comfort-food restaurant along with these prize items, to make a complete winter package out of your contest. 

Winter is a great time to engage your followers with a bit of cheeky humor, too. During particularly bad periods of weather, why not leverage the shared experience and ask people to post about how much snow they shoveled or how much longer it took them to get to a familiar destination. 

If you’ve hosted successful contests in the past, you can easily “winterize” them for re-use. For example, Riedel UK hosted this straightforward “Like to Win” contest for a set of wine glasses. This could easily be re-positioned with a message about staying warm and cozy over a glass of wine, along with a few trending hashtags like #winter or #staywarm. What campaigns have you run over the last year that might be successfully repeated with a new winter focus?

Host your Own Event

Our third idea is all about getting people out and about during the cold winter months. Hosting your own event is a great way to entice your existing customers to visit your store, as well as to reach entirely new potential customers. It’s worth it! Once a customer enters your store or shop, you’ll have a critical chance to talk to them, show them what you do and reinforce brand awareness and loyalty. 

Get creative with your event to make it stand out. This could be anything from a holiday 5K run, an in-store shopping event or a festive beer tasting. For example, BrewDog hosts a 12 Beers of Christmas event to get people out to its bars over the holiday season. It takes places over a dozen days, each featuring a tap of unique or rare beer in one of BrewDogs’ bars.

Or perhaps you work in beauty, clothing or accessories; a winter fashion show event is a perfect platform to showcase your upcoming spring line (and remind people that warm weather is indeed on the way). 

Whatever your event, be sure to create some branded merchandise to stay top of mind after it ends. This might be branded drawstring bags as part of a festive 5K running kit, branded beer bags to carry home favourite pints or free shopping totes. The BrewDog 12 Days of Christmas, for example, offers a bespoke badge for participants that “check in” with four of the participating brews. And don’t underestimate the appeal of offering simple, but special warm weather treats like sweets, mince pies, hot chocolate or coffee at your in-store event.

Lastly, another idea is to focus on a charitable winter marketing campaign, to offset the consumerism and spending habits around the holidays. Seek out a partnership with a local charity or organisation to explore any opportunities to sponsor an upcoming event or donate a portion of your winter sales to a charity, especially one that helps communities or animals through the cold winter months. 

We hope this post inspires you with a few proven ideas to get (and keep) your brand out there this winter. What other clever campaigns have you seen? How else do you plan to keep your chilly customers engaged over the winter months? We’d love to hear your ideas and see if we can help you stay top of mind as winter comes and goes.  Who knows – it might just be your most profitable or highest growth season to date!