Winter Marketing – 5 Cool & Cozy Campaign Ideas + Design Tips
Winter is almost here. Have you switched out your marketing colors and welcomed the winter palette yet? If not, start now and you’ll get a headstart to set trends before your competitor does. Winter marketing is perhaps one of the most exciting parts of the year. Christmas, New Year, post-holiday sales – there’s a lot happening around this time. Evidently, you have enough reasons to revisit your content calendar and marketing plan to come up with campaigns and marketing designs that go well with the season.
Colors that remind people of the cold wintry days, imagery that make them feel the winter vibes and a whole lot more can be used to dress up your campaign designs for the season. So, how are you going to make your brand stand out?
Don’t let the pressure of planning your holiday campaigns and winter marketing, in general, make you feel snowed under. We have some brilliant ideas for you to try this year.
Winter marketing – ideas to show that your brand is all set to embrace the new season
Winter comes with a lot of occasions to celebrate. But the truth is you do not have to wait until the holidays to start celebrating. You can start your winter sale or start running winter-themed campaigns quite early. This helps you grab eyeballs before the holiday marketing frenzy begins. Looking for ideas? No problem. Here are a few to experiment with.
Promote winter-appropriate products
Good marketing takes into account the running trends in the industry and the seasons too. Promoting bestsellers from your brand across various marketing channels is definitely a good idea. But you cannot simply focus on the bestseller without knowing what customers are buying at the moment.
Therefore, during winter, one way to tweak your marketing would be to highlight winter-appropriate products. For example, an online fashion brand can start sending out emails and display web ads for winterwear collections.
Combining this idea with a winter sale and adding a discount coupon for the purchase of these winter-ready products will help increase sales a little more. Since these products feel relevant to the season customers will find the recommendations useful and the promotions will not appear intrusive to them.
Winter-themed contests
What’s an easy way to strike up a conversation with your customers? Ask them to share a story. And for winter marketing, this could be something as simple as asking them to share a picture of their favorite winter vacation destination or something they like to do when stuck indoors on a cold winter day. Running an online contest using these questions will add great value to your winter marketing plan. That’s exactly what Coca-Cola did with its campaign here.
With campaigns like these, all it takes is promoting your idea. And customers will take care of the content part. With endless instream of user-generated content, you can easily up your marketing game.
If you wish to take this idea to the next level, try winter-themed events. These are all ways to boost engagement and also generate new leads in the process.
Kimp Tip: Offline and online events as well as online contests take a lot of planning. For them to yield the intended results you need to have catchy promotional graphics that are displayed to customers on your website, social media pages, or even sent in the brand newsletter. All of these will ensure maximum participation and thus add value to your marketing efforts.
Need help creating consistent-looking promotion graphics for various marketing channels? Sign up for a Kimp Graphics subscription.
Responsible marketing never goes out of style
So you see brands around you use winter puns and cozy visuals to initiate conversations. What if you want to do something different? How about something responsible? Something warm and thought-provoking? Now that’s an idea that never goes out of style.
An impressive 77% of consumers like to buy from brands that are trying their best to make the world a better place. And if you show them that yours does that then you are making a lasting impression on them.
For example, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, out of 419 weather stations observed in the time period 1930 to 2007, 57% of them have indicated a decline in snowfall year after year. Climate change and global warming are issues that need to be addressed. It takes the joint effort of people across the world to make a change. As a business owner or marketer, figuring out a way for your brand to take part in this change and talk about it on social media will be a good conversation starter for your brand.
In the above print ad, Greenpeace took a creative spin on the traditional snowglobe imagery for winter and packed a deeper social message into it.
Of course, when you do talk about such topics in your winter marketing plan or any other time of the year, ensure that it does not end with just a post on social media. Visible measures you take towards a more sustainable process for your business will be what it takes to earn trust.
Indulge in casual conversations
Most often, you do not need groundbreaking ideas or spectacular designs to actually engage customers. All you need is the willingness to converse with them as real people do. For this, you need to think like an individual and not a business. Twitter is a great space to do this and many brands leverage the platform for such casual conversations with their customers.
Here is one on Starbucks’ Twitter page.
Of course, when you do post such conversational content, ensure that you respond to your customers. If you leave the comments on two or three posts unattended, chances are that you will not get much engagement on your upcoming posts. And when you do respond, remember to personalize the reply. Instead of a generic message, address your customer by his or her name and leave a friendly reply. Responding with relevant emojis works too.
Kimp Tip: Similar to text posts on Twitter, if you are looking for conversation starters on Instagram, you can use your Story to ask questions or conduct winter-themed polls. These are great ways to ensure two-way communication with your audience.
Want to create Story posts that look connected to your Twitter text posts and incorporate your brand colors and winter-ready elements? The Kimp team is here to help.
Bundle up your mascot
Seasonal campaigns are so much fun especially when you have a mascot. Because you get to play around with the costume your mascot wears. And this can be a wonderful idea to bank on for your winter marketing plan. Dress up your mascot in winter clothes – mufflers, cardigans, a beanie – anything that feels fitting. Adding this dressed-up mascot to your campaign will be a simple yet significant step to take to show customers that you are all decked up for winter.
The GEICO Gecko is one of the iconic examples in the world of brand mascots. Here is how the brand dressed up Gecko for the winter.
Kimp Tip: When you do make some changes to your mascot, ensure that you do not alter too much. The core elements that personify your mascot should be retained. For example, perhaps the expression or the body language that’s so well connected to your mascot. Touch up on the outfit and you are good to go.
Do you have a mascot to represent your brand and humanize it? If not, then the Kimp team can help you design one.
Design ideas for better winter marketing campaigns
With all the campaign ideas in mind, then comes the execution part. If you have a brilliant idea but your design does not convey the theme or reflect the winter spirit, then it would be counterproductive. So, you need your designs to do justice to your ideas. Here are some design tips to break new ground with your winter marketing.
Use colors that set the winter mood
Up to 90% of the first impression of a design depends on color alone. So, if you do not get the colors right, then it’s hard to get customers to stop and take a look at what you have to say to them. So, what kind of colors work well for winter marketing? Silvers and whites and grays to depict the snow, dark blue capturing the mood of a dark winter night, or even reds, greens, and purples representing pine trees and winter berries. These are some of the ideas, to begin with. But you can always experiment with colors that work best for your brand based on your existing primary brand palette.
If your brand colors happen to overlap with winter colors, as you see in the above design, make the most of the opportunity and go for a monochromatic palette for maximum impact.
Kimp Tip: Just like choosing colors, a lot of thought goes into choosing color combinations as well. Because colors that sometimes might look good separately might create an overall different effect when brought together. So, choose your winter marketing color palette based on what goes well with your brand colors.
And if that sounds like a challenging decision, leave it to the Kimp team.
Use imagery to convey the information in a flash
Like colors, the symbols and other visual elements you use in your design can convey the theme or break the effect. Some popular elements that scream winter are snowflakes, snowmen, snow-covered peaks, frosted window panes. On the other side of the spectrum, there are the things that instantly make the viewer feel cozy like a warm mug of coffee, mufflers and mittens, a fireplace, and so on.
Make a list of all things that remind you of winter. See if these are the things that will remind your customers of winter too. Shortlist the ones that you can connect back with your brand in some way. Now these are the elements that will make your winter marketing designs look relevant for the season and on-brand too.
Be mindful of your audience and where they are located
Online commerce has now allowed entrepreneurs to run a business from any part of the world and reach out to and sell to customers in any other part of the world. That makes marketing even trickier. Especially if your business caters to customers from different parts of the world. In that case, you should be careful when you plan your winter campaigns- both in terms of the timing and the campaign ideas and designs.
Winter is not the same everywhere in the world. For example, Australia’s winter is between June to August, so, if you have customers there, it would be pointless in talking about winter to them in December. So, time your campaigns right.
Another would be the imagery. Without understanding how winters are in the geographic location you are targeting, you end up creating generic designs that do not feel personalized. For example, there are places that do not see any snowfall at all. In such cases, visuals depicting snowfall and skiing might not make much of an impact after all. Instead, look for ideas based on winter traditions in the region that you target or even the festivals that are popular during the winter months among the demographics you target.
Break the cliches
Come winter you see icy blue colors, snowflakes, and traditional winter-themed imagery everywhere. So, using these common elements means that there is a chance of your design getting lost in the sea of other winter content. One way to break that monotony would be to choose something refreshing, perhaps a warm palette that bends the rules. It might not look relevant at first glance, but when you pair it with the right copy it will!
Here is an example.
The lively color palette will be a welcome change from all the blue that your customers see in winter.
Amp up your winter marketing plan with designs by Kimp
Brands have different strategies when it comes to approaching winter marketing. Some stick with the popular holidays like Christmas and New Year and only a few make the most of the whole new season. Remember that a lot of lifestyle changes happen in winter – from people spending more time indoors to a change in the kind of products they buy. Be mindful of these changes and you will be able to come up with the best strategy for winter marketing. After all good marketing is about keeping an eye out for the right opportunity and grabbing it before your competitor does. So, start early and you’ll definitely make a difference. For winter-ready designs, Kimp’s got you covered. Sign up for a free 7-day trial now.