Embrace Summer with a Digital Marketing Revamp.

Sweater weather is here, at least for us folk here in the northern hemisphere. The resurgence of fall marketing trends are sure to follow.

The leaves are changing, the air is getting crisp. As the season transitions, it’s the perfect time for transformation—a digital marketing revamp.

Understanding marketing trends starts with the basics, which is the art of adaptation. This allows you to showcase the seasonal “it” factor without losing the authenticity of your brand.

The easy part is staying on top of the latest marketing trends, but you don’t want your business to seem cliché. Adapting your branding can be relative to mass appeal, without fully becoming something as temporary as a trend.

At the surface level, a seasonal marketing strategy feels like an abstract concept. Let’s unpack your branded content and give your audience a sense of your brand’s individuality, with just a sprinkle of pumpkin spice.

Adapt your tone and voice to current marketing trends

You can adapt current trends to your digital marketing without losing a sense of your brand’s uniqueness and identity–once you’ve established a solid base for your brand’s tone & voice to shine.

To know what’s in and out, there are a few things you should keep in mind:

Stay up to date on relevant web and social platforms
Study and analyze your competitors’ pop culture references, seasonal campaigns, and trendy content
Learn how to adapt your brand voice & tone to current trends

Resources are plentiful, such as exploring Instagram hashtags, subscribing to AdAge for weekly updates, and scrolling through your Pinterest home feed.

Pro tip: If you want your business to remain relevant and outshine your competitors, refer to woobox’s holiday social examples for inspiration.

Brand Voice vs. Brand Tone

Brand Voice

A brand voice is your specific use of language in your marketing. Simply put, your brand voice embodies your brand’s perspective, beliefs, and values. To nail it, consider how your business is unique to your competitors. This technique should remain consistent, since it encapsulates your brand personality.

After some dedicated time, development, and strategy, you should be able to assess what your brand represents with its own voice. It’s a key factor in executing your fall marketing trends, providing the spotlight to tell your story.

A strong brand voice can help you stand out to your customers. According to HBR, a “fully connected” customer – one who is completely satisfied by your brand and able to perceive “brand differentiation” – is 52% more valuable than a “highly satisfied” customer – one who is satisfied by the products you offer but not fully connected to your brand.
Frontify

SproutSocial surveyed consumers on their branding preferences, and the results are clear: each requires a strong voice. You can’t communicate effectively without one.

Brand Tone

You can distinguish your brand tone only once you’ve determined your brand voice. Your tone carries your brand persona, delivering your brand message through different expressions. It’s subject to change, depending on the desired cadence for your branding.

A brand tone is dependent on varying marketing themes. However many, using different brand tones is your brand’s form of expression. Focus on fall trends to start. As a result, adapting your tone relative to your context, makes your business sound more relatable, communicates clearly, and reaches a wider audience.

Brand tone of voice expresses your brand persona and core values through written words used to communicate with your audience. Readers want content that speaks to them—not at them or past them. A thoughtful and consistently applied brand tone can help you speak directly to your readers. This article guides you on how to achieve this for your brand.
Grammarly Business

For example, Dunkin’ Donuts uses their Instagram page to establish a familiarity with meme culture, while also showcasing a limited edition fall food and beverage selection.

At first glance, you can spot the same old pumpkin donuts and iced coffee. The fall menu comes back year-round, just revamped, because the fast-food franchise has mastered content based on current trends.

Their brand tone on this social platform appeals to a general audience, since memes populate Instagram users’ Feeds and Explore pages. It’s a familiar language that users speak.

Dunkin’s clever use of voice and tone communicates to their audience that this company gets them. They share the same sense of humor, while promoting their fall-themed products. An audience resonates with this type of seasonal marketing, their two million followers speak for the majority.

An overview of Dunkin’s current Instagram profile, accentuating the fall aesthetic and branding.

Dunkin’ Donuts witty, Gen-Z centric copy © Semrush

Audit your web and social platforms to spice up your content

Seasonal logos and colours

Incorporating different fall symbols and colours makes the biggest difference © SimpleTexting/Pinterest

Work on designing a seasonal logo or colour palette to display updated social icons, watermarks, signatures, website pages, and headers, or develop it as part of your site’s theme.

Besides, a visual revamp is an opportunity to show off your brand’s creativity, while giving it a more contemporary look and appeal. You can go for a hand-drawn or a digital style, a minimalist or maximalist approach to your designs—as long as your logo has visible autumnal elements, you’re good to go.

Depicted above is an example of an autumnal colour palette that feels warm, yet doesn’t necessarily scream Halloween. It’s about balance.

Google’s search engine logo, a fall Google Doodle from 2019 © SE Roundtable

The rule of thumb to remember as you work to incorporate fall themes into your brand is to make it as seamless as possible. Instead of simply pasting clip art onto your site, try to find colours and shapes that work with your brand’s look
Lily Norton, SimpleTexting

Italian sockwear brand Comme Si adds subtle autumnal colours to their home and product pages. The subtlety still evokes the spirit of fall, while maintaining their minimalist aesthetic. © Comme Si

Seasonal discounts, promos, and exclusive content

Krispy Kreme’s autumn-inspired doughnuts, conveniently limited edition and exclusive to their brand: displayed on their homepage © Delish

Seasonal exclusivity, related to your products or services, prompts users to take action. You can take the limited edition route, or create exclusive content through your newsletters that only sign-up members have access to.

Marketing content with a theme points back to trends, giving your audience a sense of intrigue and urgency to make a purchase. There’s no better call to action than a subconscious one.

Pro tip: Tools like wishpond allow you to add bonus entries, contests and discount pop-ups to home or landing pages on your website. For user-generated content (UGC), you can implement UGC polls, surveys, coupons, and more with woobox.

An example of wishpond’s bonus entry feature on storedge’s newsletter, with a Halloween twist and a compelling CTA for their holiday giveaway © wishpond

Communicate through fall trends with your brand messaging

Email audience segmentation

Fall trends can dictate buyer interest, no matter how often they fluctuate. They can help you assess consumer desires, keeping them coming back for more. What changes here is the messaging, as per relevance to your target audience.

Your email audience segmentation ensures you share seasonal content with the right crowd. It’s a division of your subscribers, placed into smaller groups through customer data analysis.

Audience segments are personalized for niche audiences, depending on consumer interests. If you’ve yet to personify your audience, build a digital sales funnel to segment them accordingly. After you’ve studied your buyer analytics, define what each buyer persona wants to see in their inbox.

The more aligned your content is for your subscribers, the better your chances of converting them. Email audience segmentation will then allow you to convert your users and use demographic data to strengthen your future campaigns.

Newsletters

Trending fall elements thrive in your newsletters, which is a great way to improve your email marketing. They morph into just about any form. This can be through visuals, such as photos, design, and graphics. Even in the copy itself, simply drop a fall pun and emoji in your subject lines.

Consider how you want to analyze your readers through buyer personas, then send designated emails and newsletters catered to them for each list. This way, you can resonate with the proper audience and build a strong digital presence.

Over 20% of marketers surveyed say that email design is improving their email engagement.
HubSpot, 2020

Contests and holiday giveaways

Alternatively, try launching digital campaigns with seasonal content, contests, products, events, and holiday giveaways to feature them in your emails. The bonus? These contribute to boosting your click-through rates and growing your subscriber list, among other benefits.

Shift your focus on optimizing your content as much as possible. This can be done by analyzing your email list’s growth rates and using SEO-friendly copy and keywords. Start with the users who have opened your emails and interacted with your content, then build up from there.

Essentially, if you don’t optimize your content, your piece might disappear into the Google vortex. You might have written the best article in the world, full of unique insights and helpful advice. But, if search engines can’t find it, nobody’s interested in it, or it’s pitched at the wrong audience, it’s unlikely to help you achieve your content marketing goals.
Margarita Loktionova, Semrush

Bobbi Brown uses a fall colour palette to market the launch of their new eyeshadows. They combine their new product with clever copy and eye-catching graphics in this newsletter
© Drip

Hinge, an online dating app, uses user stats to credit their Thanksgiving gratitude during the holiday season
© Hubspot

Pro tip: Newsletter software like Sender and Mailchimp make the job easier for you, providing email and text automation systems that cater to your fall themes.

They’ll alert your audience on updates and reminders on your fall contests and giveaways, rather than giving you the hassle of coming up with different ways of wording the same thing: Sign up and you could win!

An example of a Halloween promo code newsletter template, created via Sender.

People love seasonal content—especially around the holidays. In fact, on Pinterest, seasonal content drives 10x higher engagement and 22% higher online sales.
Stephanie Heitman, LocaliQ

With the right tools, you can revamp your digital branding with social engagement and brand awareness. Your business can master the skill of adapting to new trends while still maintaining its brand authenticity.

In this ever-growing digital world, you should set your brand apart from the rest. Once you achieve this, you can strategize new fall campaigns for your business with confidence.