Cultural and Seasonal Marketing: Tapping into Relevant Themes for Events Strategy

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Cultural and Seasonal Marketing: Relevant Themes for Event Strategy

Cultural and seasonal marketing strategies often look quite different when put into practice, but a defining similarity between the two is that they can help to provide more direction and focus to marketing campaigns and help to reach wider audiences. Whether you’re adapting an existing strategy in line with a seasonal theme, or taking a new approach that is more inclusive of a particular culture, these approaches are a great way to try something new with your event marketing and generate more awareness and attention because of it.

Cultural marketing in particular requires careful planning and consultation in order to strike the right tone, and both approaches need to be properly aligned with your event brand and values in order to work effectively. In this article, we explain what is involved in a cultural marketing strategy and a seasonal marketing strategy, and share top tips on how to get the most from them both.

What is Cultural Marketing?

Cultural marketing is a type of marketing that aims to specifically target a group of people that belong to a cultural demographic. The format or technique used in this marketing can vary, but the overall intention of these campaigns is to appeal to and cater to a cultural group.

It’s important to consider cultural differences when you’re developing a marketing strategy no matter who your target audience is, as different types of messaging, imagery and tone can all have a different impact depending on their cultural context. But when you take a cultural marketing approach, you’re specifically trying to reach a cultural demographic with your marketing material and potentially the specific offering behind it. 

What is Seasonal Marketing?

Seasonal marketing is an approach to marketing that promotes a product or service offering at a particular time of year, usually making reference to the time of year as part of the marketing strategy. This often refers to the month or season, such as the start of the year or summer, but can also involve holidays like Christmas, Valentine's Day or Halloween.

It might seem like seasonal marketing is an approach that only works for commercial brands, but it’s one that can be used really successfully for event marketing as well. Whether this involves designing an event for a specific time of year or theming your marketing as a way of making your event seem more relevant, it’s not just a technique that commercial brands can reap the benefits of.

Why Integrate Cultural and Seasonal Marketing into Your Event Strategy?

There are a variety of benefits to tapping into cultural and seasonal themes in your event strategy. Here are some of the key things to consider.

Increased Visibility

Both cultural and seasonal marketing strategies can help to improve your event’s visibility, which in turn can grow your following and increase attendance. This benefit is more impactful with seasonal marketing, although still relevant when you’re targeting a cultural demographic.

By either connecting an event with a specific time of year, or just adapting your marketing material to align with a seasonal theme, you’ll catch more attention from a wider audience because of the increased awareness brought about by the ‘season’. You’re also more likely to have seasonal events or marketing campaigns noticed and shared by publications or talked about on social media, which again increases visibility and boosts awareness.

Improve Inclusivity

A key benefit of a cultural marketing strategy is that it improves the inclusivity of your events. Cultural differences in marketing can sometimes mean that certain approaches don’t reach particular groups or aren’t effective at communicating the right message, but designing a strategy for your event that appeals to a particular audience mitigates this. This is particularly impactful if you make the effort to include a group that may not have previously been present in your attendee demographics, as it helps to improve the diversity of your audience.

Grow Your Audience

Both seasonal and cultural marketing strategies can help to grow your audience, following and attendee base, which is a huge benefit when it comes to growth and brand awareness.

With cultural marketing, you’ll be targeting a specific demographic, potentially one that you haven’t focused on before, which means that you’re expanding the groups within your target audience. When you’re marketing an event to this cultural group, the people within it may also share the event amongst themselves, boosting the reach.

We’ve already talked about how seasonal marketing can improve event visibility, and this visibility will help to grow your audience in turn. When your event or a marketing campaign is seasonally relevant it’s more likely to be seen and shared outside of your usual group of followers, which means that awareness will increase and a larger group of people have the opportunity to become an attendee.

Better Understanding of Attendees

If you’re looking for a way to connect more with your audience and understand your attendees better, a cultural marketing strategy can really help with this. Instead of taking a general approach to how you advertise your events, you can take a look at the cultural demographics that make up the majority of your attendees or target audience, and then tailor your marketing to the kinds of messages, imagery and approaches that they best respond to. This carries the benefit of making your marketing more effective, but also gives you a lot more insight into who your attendees are and what they respond to best.

More Targeted Campaigns

The final key reason that you should integrate cultural and seasonal marketing into your event strategy is that it can help you develop more targeted marketing campaigns. One of the main reasons that marketing campaigns aren't as effective as planned is that they don’t have a specific enough target or focus, and taking either a seasonal or cultural approach provides this focus and can help refine your efforts.

How to Create a Seasonal Marketing Strategy

Seasonal marketing campaigns can be a fantastic way to improve the visibility of your brand or event and increase the likelihood of increased media attention, shares and interest. Here are four of the best approaches to take when you’re considering seasonal content marketing.

Identify What Matters to Your Audience

As with any marketing strategy, the first thing to consider is what matters to your audience. A good thing about seasonal marketing is that it can have quite a wide reach, but if you’re not choosing holidays or events that align with what your target attendees actually care about, your campaigns won’t bring you the kind of interest that converts into ticket sales.

Whether you use general demographic data, analyse your attendee’s data or ask them about the seasonal marketing that they’d be most responsive to, it’s important to make sure that you’re choosing a theme that will actually resonate with your target attendees. For example, older demographics may respond much better to Christmas-themed marketing over a Halloween-themed approach, so you’d be wasting your resources if you focused on the latter in a marketing campaign.

Ensure Brand Relevance

Along with ensuring that you’ve chosen a seasonal theme that your audience will care about, it’s just as important to consider which holidays and times of year are relevant to your brand and your event. Picking a random theme that doesn’t align with your values, purpose and general brand image will lead to a less successful campaign, so you also need to think about whether you can seamlessly tie a seasonal approach into your general overall strategy.

If you host your events in a specific location, perhaps there’s a local holiday or celebration that you can use as inspiration. Or can you tie in a particular theme of your event to a national holiday or a ‘day of’ event?

Understand Competitors

If you’re struggling for seasonal marketing ideas, or just want to get a better idea of how others in your industry have used this approach, doing competitor research can be an incredibly useful approach. Not only can this help to spark inspiration, but you can also get a good idea of what kinds of seasonal marketing campaigns have previously been successful in your industry, and which kinds you’re probably best off avoiding.

Encourage Seasonal Contributions and Interaction

As part of your seasonal marketing efforts, one of the best ways to generate as much interest in your campaign is to capitalise on increased enthusiasm for the seasonal event and encourage more contributions and interactions from your audience. If you time this well and use the right messaging, you’ll likely get more engagement than usual.

Seasonal giveaways or discounts are a great tactic, offering free tickets or a discount in exchange for something like a comment or a share on a post or a submission such as a photo or a review. If you’re choosing a seasonal theme in line with a significant holiday or celebration, you could also ask your following to share their own content about how they’re marking the occasion and tag your brand or event in this, helping to boost your reach.

How to Create a Cultural Marketing Strategy

A cultural marketing strategy is less about the theme, style and aesthetic of your marketing efforts in line with a holiday or time of year, and more about the research you do into a demographic and then how you apply this knowledge to your marketing approach. Here are four key pieces of advice to follow.

Speak to an Expert

Perhaps the most important thing to remember when you’re implementing a cultural marketing strategy is that you should talk to an expert from that culture throughout the process. The last thing you want is to make a cultural faux pas because you failed to consult anyone from the demographic you’re targeting, and it’s easy to avoid this by consulting an expert and consistently checking your campaign ideas with them.

Decide on Goals

Having goals for a marketing campaign is quite a common piece of advice, but in this context, it’s advisable to set specific goals in line with why you’re targeting a specific culture and what you want to gain from this. Not only will this help to make your approach more effective, but it also helps to ensure that you’re taking a considerate and meaningful approach with a clear intention of what you want the outcome to be.

Focus on Value

Promoting the value that your event offers is a very effective approach to your marketing content, and when it comes to a cultural strategy, you can continue this by focusing on promoting the value that you’re offering the target demographic. It’s not enough to just use messaging or channels that are particularly relevant to this group; you need to specifically highlight the value that your event is offering them and why this is unique to your brand. 

Keep it Relevant

Finally, in the same way that we talked about the importance of relevance in seasonal marketing, if you’re taking a cultural approach to your growth and advertising strategy then you need to ensure that it feels relevant to your brand. Your event should offer genuine value to the demographic and should be an inclusive and welcoming space, and if you don’t ensure this first then in the end, your strategy will have been for nothing.

With a cultural approach to marketing, you also don’t want your efforts to be misconstrued as tokenistic, which they might be if there’s little relevance to the rest of your brand and your values. So before you decide on how you’d like to expand the demographics within your attendee base, make sure that you’re choosing an approach that is in line with the kind of event or events that you offer.

Summary

Aligning your strategic event marketing with cultural and seasonal themes is a great way to create more relatable and impactful experiences for your audience. As the population becomes more global and awareness of all kinds of holidays and events increases, knowing this with your events and how you promote them can help you to stand out from competitors and develop better relationships with your attendees.

Key takeaways

• Cultural Marketing: Marketing that aims to specifically target a group of people that belong to a cultural demographic
• Sasonal Marketing : Promotes a product or service offering at a particular time of year. This often refers to the month or season, such as the start of the year or summer, but can also involve holidays like Christmas, Valentine's Day or Halloween.
• Boost Visibility and Growth: Cultural and seasonal marketing strategies enhance event visibility, attract a broader audience and increase event attendance.
• Enhance Inclusivity: Cultural marketing improves inclusivity by targeting specific demographics, fostering diversity and understanding.
• Create Targeted Campaigns: These strategies enable more focused and relevant marketing, ensuring alignment with audience interests.
   

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