In the countdown to Easter your newsfeed, newspaper, and even your news broadcasts will be full of Easter imagery. Eggs, chicks, bunnies and spring blooms are emblematic of the springtime festival. So, of course, is more traditional Christian imagery. Particularly in video. We should know: we have free stock video footage of Easter-related content coming out of our ears.
Why exactly do almost all brands, influencers and businesses churn out this content? Sure, it makes sense for a chocolatier to highlight their confectionary around this time of year. A well-placed Instagram video advertisement can have a direct impact on revenue and engagement at a time when chocolate sales are high. (Provided, of course, it’s been optimised for the platform). Even an egg vendor or garden center may be equally well-placed to take advantage of the hype. When your go-to washing-machine manufacturer jumps on the bandwagon, however, it’s a stretch.
Stock Video Download: Children Take Chocolate Eggs from a Bowl
You might question what leaps of logic led their marketing department to an Easter-related marketing video. What exactly do white goods have to do with a Christian festival of resurrection, a pagan celebration of the equinox, or a secular appreciation of spring? Whatever Easter means to you and your community, it’s unlikely that lavender-scented laundry pods or dryer sheets enter the equation.
Then, almost as quickly as it starts, it’s over. Once the holiday has passed, videos, podcasts, articles, and e-cards relating to the trend disappear without a trace. Heavily discounted Easter eggs may still line the supermarket shelves, but digital video has moved on. This, it should be noted, is not an Easter-specific phenomenon. The same can be said of Christmas (yes, we have free stock footage for that too), back-to-school time (did someone say education stock videos?), Valentine’s Day (yup), Halloween (of course), or even National Wear Your Pyjamas to Work Day. (That’s on April 16th, by the way, and we’re all for it.)
Stock Video Download: Man in Dressing Gown Using Laptop
Any date with a name, cause, or celebration attached to it becomes a cutoff point in the digital content calendar. So why is it so important to consider dates like Easter in your video marketing strategy? The short answer is that, while some video marketing campaigns may be evergreen, but – generally – consumer viewing and spending habits are as seasonal as wildlife. This can make it expensive to shoot and produce, which, incidentally, is one reason we love stock footage and think you should too. Specific emotional responses, societal expectations, experiences and encounters can all be exploited to drive engagement, increase sales, or improve awareness. Like those Easter Eggs in the ‘reduced’ section, however, they also have a shelf-life.
So what kinds of seasonal factors should you consider taking advantage of when considering your video content? We’ve outlined three hypothetical case studies below to help you get creative with planning visual campaigns that feel relevant to your audience all year round. And, well, if you want to use our free motion graphics, sound effects, royalty-free music and stock footage clips to help you, who are we to stop you?
Food and Content
It may seem like an old-fashioned concept these days, with genetic modification of crops, controlled monoculture greenhouses, and global exports but food has long been seasonal by agricultural necessity.
It’s still difficult to, for example, source pineapples in the dead of winter, but not altogether impossible. We should know. We managed it. That Brussels sprouts become edible in the winter is the reason they’re a Christmas dinner staple in the northern hemisphere. Ewes give birth to lambs in early spring. It’s no coincidence that Lamb is a popular Easter recipe.
Stock video download: Pineapple in the Snow
How does this feed into video marketing though?
Consider that you’re a social media cooking channel. You regularly post videos on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram with easy-to-make recipes you can do with young children. You make revenue from sponsorships, advertising revenue and recipe book sales. Your single video of an easy-to-make banana and cinnamon bread will, after a time, become stale to advertisers and your audience. Until you consider the true commodity that you are selling: rather than child-friendly recipes, you are selling convenience.
Stock video download: Parents and Child Baking
By making seasonal edits of your video, you can regularly imbue that one concept with a new lease of life; At Easter time, egg or chocolate chips would be your hero ingredient because parents or carers will already have them in the house for other seasonal activities; in summer, why not push the bananas into the spotlight as fruit becomes the season’s superstar? Come autumn, you might highlight spices as general culinary emphasis shifts to ingredients like cinnamon. This ensures ingredients-purchasers are less likely to have to make a specialist purchase to complete your recipe.
You don’t have to be a culinary business, cookbook publisher, or healthy eating campaigner to recognise the value of noticing how seemingly universal products like food aren’t as stable year-round as you might think. Think about how you can tailor your video content to align with both the habits and practices your target audience might experience. You can also take into account special food considerations and varieties, like vegan or gluten-free recipe variations.
Weather and Vocabulary
The concept of four seasons is not a universal one. Many places across the globe such as India have two, not four: namely, the wet and dry season. Other regions have consistent weather all year round. The weather we associate with common calendar dates – such as Christmas, Valentine’s day (February 14th), or Easter – has different meteorological associations in Australia than they do the UK.
Weather has a direct effect on our emotional wellbeing. This phenomenon has been so well documented that there’s even a medical term for it. Here at Videvo, even our collections have an emotional bent. The content of our January Blues collection (a series of stock video clips about sadness, depression and low moods) is worlds away from ‘Spring Vibes’ which comprises uplifting stock videos of flowers, sunshine and wellness.
Stock Video Download: A Bunny and a Bear in the Pouring Rain
But what does this have to do with your video marketing strategy? Imagine you are an international travel agency. You arrange customised surprise holiday packages according to your clients’ answers to a questionnaire you supply. Vacations are a recreational activity, intended to cultivate a specific kind of mood and cater to recreational tastes. Your product is not so much flights, hotel bookings, and activities. These are a vehicle to your true commodity which is, essentially, emotional satisfaction.
For example, in January in the Northern hemisphere, your social media marketing videos may focus on emotionally resonant words such as ‘getaway’ or ‘retreat’. These words evoke the promise of an escape from the trials and tribulations of the daily grind, and might resonate with audiences suffering from the winter blues. At the same time of year, your company’s branches in the Southern Hemisphere. might benefit from promising ‘adventure’ and ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ experiences through video marketing. This would tap into a different emotional state: it taps into feelings of confidence and exuberance commonly associated with sunshine and warm temperatures.
Stock Video Download: Successful Backpackers on a Hilltop
Whether you’re a local boutique or an international conglomerate, geography matters. Seasonal marketing is a question of the right place as well as the right time. Geography, as much as weather, holidays and social customs is a key player in a successful video marketing campaign.
Audience-reach and Data-driven Insights
Holiday or seasonal video marketing may seem like an ephemeral phenomenon, but its role in identifying, cultivating, and targeting your target demographic is invaluable. Holidays – and seasons – mean different things to different people. Someone who suffers from hay-fever, for example, may feel differently about the summer months than someone who does not. Likewise, women may feel more strongly about International Women’s Day (March 8th) than men. Boomers Millennials may have a significantly different reaction to Internet Safety Day (February 8th) than their younger, teenage, Gen X counterparts. Treating seasons and days like these as a litmus test to see whether your target demographic is adequately engaged with your mission, service or product can inform your operational strategy for the rest of the year.
Stock video download: Boxer Looking Into the Camera
If, for instance, you are a pressure group, dedicated to eradicating reliance on fossil fuels by 2040, watch-times, numbers of shares and likes, or the tenor of comments on your marketing videos may vary significantly on when they’re published. Measuring if your cause receives more negative attention during colder periods (when people rely on fossil fuels to heat their homes), for example, may help you identify areas of domestic fuel consumption that require your attention. If aligning your cause with Earth Day (22nd April) doesn’t garner the attention or engagement you had hoped, then this might be a clear sign that you need to reassess how you reach your target audience. Perhaps your message is unclear, or unappealing to certain age groups. On the other hand, if you surpass your marketing KPIs on Global Wind Day (June 15th), this could show that you may achieve significant progress by harnessing the goodwill of wind turbine energy supporters.
Stock video download: Aerial View of Wind Turbines
Whether your enterprise is ideologically motivated, profit-driven, both or neither, the key takeaway here is that you shouldn’t ignore landmark dates in your advertising calendar, or dismiss them as fluff or a fad. They are crucial to gathering the data – qualitative and quantitative – that will let you identify weak and strong elements of your overall strategy.
Conclusion
So, whether you celebrate Easter, think about the kinds of videos, adverts, web pages and media you’re consuming. The chances are, someone has been thinking about Easter egg videos since Christmas. These projects now rolled out, they may even be planning their upcoming Christmas video content again!
Flip through the calendar and mark the dates that seem important to you and your audience. Don’t, however, just jump on the seasonal bandwagon. Your lavender laundry pod business may benefit more from a National Laundry Day campaign (April 15th, if that’s your sort of thing) with clear objectives than an Easter video with none. Think about how dates and seasonal variations in consumer habits might connect to the core values of your business or organisation. Next, when assessing your key performance indicators, try to consider what insights the next holiday season can give you. Finally, remember you’re not in it by yourself! Videvo has thousands of royalty-free video clips, audio tracks and motion graphics suitable for any project, no matter the season, place or message. Why not check them out? After you’ve raided the local supermarket for great chocolate discounts, that is.
Image by: Biegun Wschodni
