Smart Brands Use Summer to Connect with Consumers

With summer on the horizon, thoughts of sunshine and warmer weather are influencing consumer buying behavior and attitudes. This seasonal shift to summer serves as a catalyst for brands to connect with new audiences, or reconnect with those that have been in hibernation mode.

When planning your company’s outreach strategies this upcoming season, it may be helpful to enlist the expertise of an experiential marketing agency to explore time-sensitive activation ideas. Consider what mobile marketing tours, social media contests, or other engagement tactics should coincide with summer, and how to maximize the impact of these touches.

Does the Season Lend itself to your Brand?

In order to leverage a stand-out summer marketing campaign, there has to be a natural and relevant connection that makes sense. Can this seasonal timing reflect the “fun in the sun” attributes of your brand? Is there an organic way to integrate beach vacations, rooftop BBQ’s, pool parties, seasonal holidays, or other outdoor imagery and language into your messaging? Could the warmer weather encourage customers to use your products or services more frequently? If so, there might be a platform to achieve the sales, marketing, lead generation, or other ROI goals that your company is hoping to meet.

Determine where to position your brand with your consumers.

Over the next several months, face-to-face marketing and consumer engagement will soar as fairs, festivals, sporting events and concerts dominate the outdoor scene. This landscape provides companies with a myriad of options of how to ultimately reach their end users, and through what medium. Marketing Managers should weigh the events that will best promote their brand against the demographics of the event attendees, and decide what type of on-site activation will engage their target audience.

Enhance the Connection with Experiential Elements.

It’s important to keep in mind that companies using experiential marketing to reach these audiences will gain an advantage that traditional marketing (print, television, radio) can’t deliver—the ability to engage face-to-face with consumers. So, in addition to marketing summertime-related products; your Brand Ambassadors, street teams, and mobile marketing tour managers should be capitalizing on the conversation this season, and sharing this real-time feedback to reshape or reinforce the direction of your brand.

Our Summertime Challenge

Last summer, our experiential marketing agency was presented with an opportunity to collaborate with Corona Light, and a Columbus-based bar that attracts hundreds of consumers to its outdoor patio. Corona Light was also sponsoring a Cancun Spring Break Giveaway, and needed expertise to develop the sweepstakes, while also increasing beverage sales in the local market.

Event Marketing Strategies generated a social media strategy in which contest followers were encouraged to post their favorite vacation spot photos online using the custom branded contest hashtag #cancunwithcoronalight. Additionally, targeted event nights at the bar such as, “College Night Wednesdays,” leveraged the promotion and excitement of the contest with a captured audience.

By connecting the summertime beverage Corona Light with a summertime destination bar, and also promoting a Spring Break contest on top of this partnership, Event Marketing Strategies was able to create an integrated seasonal campaign. This four-week promotion is a perfect example of a time-sensitive program that capitalized on the season, and found ways to connect a product to both new and loyal consumers.