Seasonal trends have always been a huge influence on the retail sector, which means it should be a major focus for your LED signage. In actual fact, if your digital signage isn’t properly reflecting seasonal trends, there’s a decent chance that you could be losing out on customers. So, let’s talk a bit more about why seasonal trends are so important for keeping your customers coming back time and time again – plus, we’ll be sharing a few useful pointers on how can you fine-tune them for maximum effectiveness?
Why are seasonal trends so important for your LED digital displays?
In a nutshell, staying on top of seasonal trends is consistently one of the best ways to maximise the effectiveness of your LED digital signage, by ensuring that it stays aligned with your customers’ moods, needs, and shopping habits all year round. In other words, it keeps your content relevant.
The early Autumn is a particularly busy time for seasonal trends, as the Back-to-School season is quite rapidly followed by Halloween, which often overlaps with preparation for the Christmas season. Each one marks a subtle but significant shift in consumer behaviour, both in terms of what they’re looking for, and how they’re looking for it.
For the back to school season for example, parents will be focused and highly selective about what they’re buying, as they’ll be working to a very strict set of specifications: a combination of the school dress code, and the sizes of clothes that are appropriate for their child.
Halloween on the other hand marks a period of spending that gives retailers their first annual taste of what shopping will be like at Christmas, although initially perhaps not quite as intense. However, it dovetails straight into the festive season, one of the undeniably busiest times of the year.
Throughout all that time, your LED advertising displays will play a vital role in attracting customers to your shop floor, as well as influencing their purchases once they’re inside. In fact, the ability to quickly adapt to seasonal trends can be regarded as one of the key reasons why LED digital signage is so useful to the retail sector – messaging can be changed on the fly with virtually no notice, saving on the time and money normally spent on printing costs.
For those reasons alone, it’s probably no wonder that LED digital displays are almost universally considered to be crucial to success in any retail event. After all, customers don’t need telling about the existence of these seasonal trends – they just want to know what you’re planning on doing about them.
3 quick tips to make sure you get your seasonal campaign right first time
It’s not hard to come up with a seasonal marketing campaign. The hard bit is making sure it successfully achieves what you want it to. In fact, that’s a great place for us to start with our first bit of advice…
Have a goal
This is by far one of the most important aspects to forming a successful campaign. As we touched on above, your LED digital displays need to do more than just tell customers ‘it’s Christmas’ (or similar). Take a moment to work out specifically what you’re trying to do, and how you’d like customers to react to your displays. Since you’re in retail, the answer is probably: buy now! But what do you want them to buy? When, and how?
Knowing the answers to all these questions will help you set clear calls-to-action, encouraging your customers to react in the ways you want them to. If you can, try and keep the number of these calls-to-action to a minimum, so that you’re clearly and consistently communicating the same key messages across all of your customer touchpoints, thereby maximising their effectiveness.
Offer them something different
The word ‘seasonal’ itself implies the availability of something that customers can’t get at any time of year, so make sure that you’re offering something that fits that description! If there are any new products or services you can imagine offering for the seasonal period, consider doing that, or if not, you might want to think about limited-time discounts that you can offer on certain products.
For example, you could offer a special price on school shoes in the Back-to-School period at the beginning of September, or on select fancy dress items at Halloween. After all, it’s likely that at least some of your competitors are offering broadly similar products or services during this time, so the question for consumers is: why should they buy from you?
Take care to keep it relevant
As we’ve explored a bit already above, keeping it relevant is the key to the success of any campaign with your digital display boards. Always keep your core audiences in mind, and their backgrounds, moods, habits, and characteristics. Even if you’re casting your net as widely as possible, the same rules still apply. You might be targeting a relatively broad age range, but are there certain times that your customers are likely to be shopping, or certain places?
Don’t forget to consider how well your customers know you already, and what expectations they might have for your brand – whether that’s bargain prices, or a luxury selection, or an extensive range of choice. If your seasonal plans don’t deliver on those expectations, they might well decide to shop elsewhere.
Those are just some of our top suggestions – you may well be able to think of some of your own! And if you’re looking for places to get started, don’t hesitate to check out our post on content inspiration for your LED signage. Alternatively, just get in touch with one of our experts here at Scanlite, and we’ll be only too happy to answer any questions that you might have.
We have an extensive range of digital signage solutions and we know this technology inside out, including the many ways in which it can be used to achieve your goals as a business. To find out how we can help you, feel free to give us a call today on 01253 302723, or email us on sales@scanlite.co.uk.
