Peak season will be here before we know it, so it pays off to start preparing early. With Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the festive season prime time to maximise your sales, you need to have a strong strategy. We take you through 10 actionable tips to help you stay ahead of the curve and maximise your sales when the time comes.
During low seasons, you should focus on creating demand through general brand awareness and anticipation to keep your brand top of mind all year round. This is a great time to test campaigns, build a community and gather data to leverage the results in peak season.
Peak season is the time to capture demand by activating more product-led campaigns to gain sales when your audience is ready to buy. This approach could put you ahead of competitors who wait until peak season to engage with their audience.
Optimising your content and choosing your keywords ahead of peak season is essential for SEO. It can take around 3-6 months to start ranking in Google after optimising for search, but this is a rough guide and could potentially take longer if you’ve chosen competitive keywords with a high difficulty. The earlier you can get started, the better!
Ahead of peak season, your product listings must be up to date and include keywords that match seasonal searches. How you go about this depends on how the search functionality works wherever your product is listed.
For example, if you’re using Amazon, you want to add your seasonal terms to the item’s title and bullet points, ensuring the bullet points are no more than 200 bytes (around 200 words). Anything you add after this mark won’t be indexed.
If you’re listing on your own site, you need to understand how your search function operates. Ensure that your site search works for synonyms and broad product names, and include different terms for your product in the description. It can help ensure potential customers find relevant results for their queries.
Inventory teams can get their orders in months or even years in advance. It’s essential to have a clear line of communication with them to ensure you’re pushing the right products. Meanwhile, finance teams are likely to have clear goals for sales in peak season. Syncing your strategies with collaborative tools and regular check-ins will help build good relationships and will make sure you’re working in unison for maximum impact.
Customer relationship management (CRM) software can have limitations depending on your plan. During peak season, you’re sending more emails than usual, both for receipts and campaigns. You have a higher rate of customer service activity and may want to use extra marketing tools like SMS or Whatsapp messages. Make sure you have the proper setup to avoid additional fees or having your strategy blocked by emails not sending.
If you’re running a brand community for a seasonal business, you must find ways to keep your core customers loyal, even when sales velocity drops. This is when your community and social team have to step up. One great way to make customers feel valued and engaged is to set up Facebook or WhatsApp groups – WhatsApp business is great for this – to focus on different parts of your brand. Ask members about new products and ideas. Then ramp up activities with face-to-face events and meet-ups before and during peak windows. Find out more about building a community-led brand with our whitepaper.
Built into Google’s paid search offering are two vital features for optimising in low season and making the most of peak season.
The first is Smart Bidding, available for both Search and Shopping Ads. This helps you track different keywords and automatically bid on them, allowing you to optimise your bids and inform how you build out your campaigns. Include ad extensions such as call, location and sitelinks to help attract more people and increase click-through rates. Seasonality is automatically factored in, but if you expect a sudden, short-term change in conversion rates, you can even create a Seasonality Adjustment.
The second is Dynamic Search Ads. These boost your brand as they show up based on site content instead of keywords. Google reads your site’s content, then gathers, analyses and matches it to search terms. Then, it automatically generates ads based on your site and presents them to consumers who enter your search terms. So, when you update your site with seasonal content, your ads will be relevant. If you’re new to Dynamic Search Ads, start with only the highest converting pages. Although using these for many pages could help you identify missing keywords, it can also ramp up your spending.
The last thing you want is for your campaign to pause due to restrictive limits or banks that don’t understand your spend strategy. Instead of dealing with different platforms and currencies, receipts and invoices, and arguing with banks over spend limits, you can make running ads easier with Juni. With automatic receipt generation, real-time spend insights, Google Ads invoices auto-pulled into your account, and your dedicated Juni inbox for receipts and invoices, keeping track of your payments is simple. You can also boost your cash flow with credit, cashback and more to help you fund ad campaigns and unlock revenue growth. Make sure you have the financial tools and insights you need to scale your spend and support your peak season strategy.
Peak season can mean back-to-back campaigns with differing criteria, whether you’re offering discounts, launching new products, or simply keeping up with the holidays. There’s a lot to prepare, from landing pages to ad creative, so start preparing your campaigns in advance. You’ll have more time to develop creative ideas, plan your discount strategy and look back on past campaigns to see what you can learn.
What works for one seasonal business will not necessarily work for the next. But for all DTC brands, seasonal marketing should be about seeing the year as one continuous opportunity, with the high seasons informing the low and vice versa. Within that, every team member should work in unison, from the same calendar, and with the same goals. That requires a lot of planning, support from the right tech and the ability to act fast.
This article was updated January 2024
Juni is not a bank – yet. We’re a financial technology company providing e-money services and as such are not part of a deposit guarantee scheme. Learn more about our license and how we keep your business and money safe.
Juni Technology AB (company number 559248-0908) is licensed and registered as an electronic money institution with the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority (Sw. Finansinspektionen) (license no: 64025). Payment Card Solutions (UK) Limited (company number 05941947) and UAB B4B Payments Europe (company number 305539054) are regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (ref: 930619) and the Bank of Lithuania (licence no: 76), respectively. The Juni Mastercard Corporate Card is issued by Payment Card Solutions (UK) Limited and UAB B4B Payments Europe pursuant to a license by Mastercard International Incorporated. Mastercard and the circles design are registered trademarks of Mastercard International Incorporated. Juni Technology AB. Masthamnsgatan 21, 413 28 Göteborg, Sweden. © 2025 Juni. All Rights Reserved.
