Calendar-Based Events:
Impact’s 8 Key Must-Win Moments For Brands
Generating consistent interest in your brand over the whole year is a mission. You may be fighting gaps in your marketing calendar or industry seasonality. Leveraging the holidays and seasons significant to your brand and audience is the key to making timely, consistent impact that carries your brand further. Calendar-based events are an opportunity to bring your brand to life in meaningful moments throughout the year.
Below, you’ll uncover how to use calendar-based events and promotional products to deliver unreal results for your brand – and win this key moment.
What are Calendar-Based Events?
Calendar-based events are the common holidays and seasons that are relevant to your brand.
Universal seasons, like spring and summer; and dates celebrated on a global scale, like Christmas and Valentine’s Day, can be leveraged to focus your marketing efforts. Alternatively, marketing toward other common dates, such as International Women’s Day and Clean Up Australia day can help you connect with your customers and clients based on your shared values.
“There are endless #World, #International and #National holidays, and awareness days, weeks and months, which all present great marketing opportunities for businesses in any industry. Taking advantage of these milestone dates can lead to increased customer interaction, lead generation and brand awareness.”
Deciding what calendar-based events are relevant to your brand and your audience is the first step to creating an effective marketing calendar. You should include your own brand milestones and consider any dates that help to counteract seasonality in your industry.
Impact’s 8 Key Must-Win Moments
What are they?
Over our 20+ years of branding experience, we’ve learned that the most effective brands connect with their audience in key must-win moments. Now, these moments vary across industries, however we’ve narrowed them down to the eight most common.
- Calendar-Based Events
- Gift With Purchase
- Point of Sale Presence
- Events and Tradeshows
- Campaigns and Promotions
- Educational Campaigns
- Onboarding
- Rewards
You may find that your brand focus is just one of the key moments. Or maybe your brand finds the most success in three, or five, or all of these. Whichever it is, if you can bring your brand to life in these key must-win moments, you can make a meaningful connection with your audience.
Why are calendar-based events one of the key must-win moments?
Have you ever needed to create content to fill a gap in your social media schedule? Or needed a blog that would relate to a large audience? Searching for “International Day of…” can be a lifesaver when the creative juices just aren’t flowing. This is because calendar-based events provide a wealth of content creation opportunities.
Blog posts, social media content, videos, or infographics around these events are a creative way to educate, entertain, or inspire your brand’s audience – and stay top-of-mind for customers.
Ultimately, calendar-based events give you a strategic framework to plan on-brand marketing activities, engage with customers, and drive business growth. By leveraging these events, you have a perpetual schedule that helps you stay relevant, increase visibility, and create meaningful connections with your customers and clients.
So how do you get the most out of your calendar-based events?
There’s one way that we know.
“During seasonal transitions or the holidays, seasonal marketing creates a unique feeling of excitement and fear of missing out for customers worldwide, leading to encouraging actions, like purchases.”
How to boost your calendar-based events with promotional products.
Find customer-brand alignment
Calendar-based events provide your brand with opportunities to align your marketing efforts with specific dates or seasons relevant to your target audience. For example, Boxing Day, Mother’s Day or International Literacy Day may be important dates for your customers. By engaging meaningfully with them around these events, you can create timely and relevant marketing campaigns that resonate.
Top these campaigns off with creative branded merchandise to facilitate lasting connections that increase brand loyalty. You might consider giving away a natural product pamper pack to your contacts in the education industry for International Teacher’s Day. Or perhaps you’d add a free full-colour neck gaiter or cooling bandana into your fitness club membership for National Hiking Day.
On-brand promotional products amplify your brand values and communicate them to your customers. By showing that you understand the dates significant to them, you demonstrate compatibility that results in greater conversion and target market engagement.
Make it limited edition
Calendar-based events create a sense of urgency. Optimise that with limited edition branded merchandise. When customers know that a product is only available for a limited time or in limited quantities, it heightens FOMO. Which, in turn, drives customers to make a purchase quickly before the product is no longer available. Additionally, putting a limit on products also raises its perceived value. When something isn’t easily accessible to everyone, it’s exclusive and special, leading your customers to pay more for it.
Your limited-edition merchandise could include premium cocktail sets for the festive season, or a full-colour sublimated shirt to commemorate the key day.
Apparel – like these hoodies we created for the Victorian Aboriginal Health Service NAIDOC Week march – makes for effective calendar-based event merchandise. Their low cost is budget friendly, and they are highly repeatable. Change the design each year and you could build a fan-base who engage with you each year just to get the whole set.
Conversely, limited edition promotional products can also serve as a way for you to test new product concepts without committing to a full-scale incorporation right away. By releasing stock in a limited quantity around your calendar-based events, you can gauge customer interest and gather feedback before deciding whether to add the merch into your general product offering.
Create on-brand experiences.
Think of brands like Harrods or Coca-Cola around Christmas, Starbucks in autumn, and Meat and Livestock Australia (or more specifically, lamb) on Australia Day. These brands have created a distinct, traditional feeling that has become synonymous with the season. To the point where they suggest that you cannot have a true “insert holiday or season” without their product.
Such is the strength of their branded experience.
Your give-aways, rewards or point-of-sale products should be what your audience look out for when the season rolls around. Because with your brand, their calendar-based event will be all that it should be.
Again, wearables are very effective when you want your clients and customers to make memories that include your brand. In our article about branded apparel, we explain more about how clothing and accessories act as mementos of significant events.
Does anyone you know have a Christmas shirt? Or their favourite hat to wear while they barbeque on ANZAC day? Your promotional products may not always look like much on their own, but they take on more meaning when they’re used to participate in the activities that your audience enjoy on these key dates. Creating positive branded experiences.
Employing creative promotional products for use in calendar-based events gives you the opportunity to engage with your customers in a more effective way. You can supplement your interactive campaigns, contests, or special event offers with merch that encourages your customers to participate and interact with your brand. This engagement fosters a sense of community that translates to greater conversion and brand loyalty.
Forbes has compiled some advice about how to leverage holidays in your marketing.
And you can read about how calendar-based events can impact the timeliness of your promotional products in this article, and make sure you don’t get caught out next season.
