The three steps to creating effective seasonal content

Halloween is almost upon us, and alongside the pumpkin spiced lattes and Pennywise costumes comes an indigestible amount of seasonal content from brands. Some of it is absolutely amazing, some… not so much.

When it comes to seasonal content, it can sometimes be difficult to:

1. Come up with content ideas in the first place
2. Create content that’s both useful and relevant to your target audience

In this article, we’ll explore three essential steps to creating some really good seasonal content.

Use Google Trends to get the timing right

Google Trends is an invaluable tool for figuring out when’s the right time to start planning and posting seasonal pieces of content. Let’s use the search term ‘halloween costume ideas’ for this example:

As you can see, the usage of this search term has steadily increased from July through to mid-October. For a more relevant result, you can change your catchment area to the UK, which brings up a slightly different result:

From this data, you can see that the search term is used more from the beginning of September onwards. So, if you owned a fancy dress business for example, this is when you would start producing seasonal content. If you are an extremely localised business or you don’t have an ecommerce site, you can even narrow the results down even more:

Think about why people use certain keywords

When it comes to seasonal content creation, just using a pumpkin background is not enough. You’ve probably heard this a thousand times, but brands these days really need to connect with their target audience on a personal level to see any kind of conversion from their content. This is also true with keywords – simply whacking a key phrase into a piece of copy and hoping for the best just isn’t going to cut it. Especially not in the ever-competitive world of seasonal content.

No, to have the best chance of creating something that’s going to stick in the minds of your audience, you need to understand not just what people are searching for around this time, but why they’re searching it. Let’s use Christmas as an example.

Here you’ll see the keyword ‘christmas dinner ideas’, taken from the Moz Keyword Tool:

If you own a wood burner stove company, for example, this could be an interesting keyword to use. I’m going to show you two blog snippets, and you can decide which one you think would be the most effective content piece.

“December 25th is just around the corner, so you’ll probably have some delicious Christmas dinner ideas planned. When you’re relaxing after your meal, a wood burner stove in the lounge would really add to that festive ambiance.”

or

“A wood burner stove is great for warming the home, but did you know that they can also be used for cooking? They’re great for having an extra place to cook food when you’re making that all-important Christmas feast – so here are some Christmas dinner ideas that can be cooked in a wood burner stove.”

The first one, although well written, doesn’t really offer anything to the reader. Yes, we’re all aware that wood burner stoves create a lovely ambiance and look great – especially at Christmas – but it’s hardly a game changing statement. The second snippet, however, introduces a blog post that could be telling the reader something new – and let’s remember, if you’ve searched ‘christmas dinner ideas’, chances are you want to see some actual recipes in your Google search results.

Relate your content to the human emotions of each season

The most effective seasonal content is that which really relates to the human emotions that come with each season. Here are some examples:

So how would you create content from these emotions? Let’s use Valentine’s Day as an example. Say you were a clothing company that sold fashionable apparel for young women. Keeping human emotions in mind, two seasonal blog ideas in the lead up to Valentine’s Day could be:

1. Fancy dinner date coming up? Our five favourite dresses to make you look drop dead gorgeous this Valentine’s Day
2. No boyfriend, no problem! Five killer outfits to wear on the dancefloor this “Galentine’s” Day

Two very similar pieces of seasonal content, derived from two completely different emotions.

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