Everything feels more optimistic when the sun shines, and the light lingers long into the evening. Summertime is a happy season, and as a marketer you can harness this positive energy and embrace storytelling to your brand-boosting advantage.

Many people see seasonal marketing campaigns as exclusive to annual events like Valentine’s, Easter, and Christmas. But if you want to drive brand awareness and sell your products to a highly engaged audience, summer is the time to strike.

Do you want to get ahead during the sunny season? Here, we’ll look at how to create a summer marketing campaign that will drive results.

What we’ll cover here:

• Why should you invest in seasonal marketing campaigns?
• A step-by-step guide to launching a successful summer marketing campaign
  • Know your audience and their seasonal motivations
  • Set your summer marketing campaign goals
  • Select a hook to engage your audience
  • Choose your summer campaign toolkit
  • Create content and roll it out
  • Engage and interact with your audience
  • Measure performance and refine content

Studies from Barclays show that in June 2023 alone, consumer card spending across categories saw a 5.4% year-on-year increase despite rising levels of inflation. Plus, last year, RetailMeNot found that 95% of US consumers anticipated taking part in summer activities, including going to the beach (39%), hosting a family event (32%) or shopping (29%).

These insights demonstrate a clear motivation to experience, engage, and spend during the summer months. Tap into this energy with messaging that motivates your audience and you stand to expand your brand reach while boosting your profits.

For example, Tropicana’s ‘The Juice That Starts It All’ campaign served up a fresh take on its messaging at the start of summer. The campaign gave a nod to the brand’s 70-year legacy with the bold claim that it ‘basically invented’ orange juice (and as a result, brunches and mimosas!).

This fun and spritely ad campaign was distributed across social media platforms including TikTok, as well as YouTube and streaming platforms, including Hula and Disney Plus. 

By adopting a multichannel approach, the summer marketing campaign tapped into a younger audience of digital natives earned droves of engagement – worth thinking about if you engage in youth marketing. 

A recent summer marketing campaign that really stands out from the crowd is Billie’s Scratch-and-Sniff Armpit campaign. The natural deodorant brand has launched this nostril-tingling campaign ahead of the summer to build a buzz ahead of the hot weather.

Billie’s immersive campaign invites New Yorkers to scratch-and-sniff billboard images of peoples’ armpits to enjoy its fresh all-day deodorant fragrances. This genius feat of immersive sensory marketing has already built a buzz, with consumers taking to social media to share their interaction with Billie’s campaign.

The takeaway? A seasonal marketing campaign is a powerful promotional tool as you can tap into a specific theme, concept or mood that will likely inspire, engage or motivate your audience. 

Harnessing the feel-good power of summer, you can solve very specific consumer pain points (like trying to avoid body odor!) in a playful way. In turn, this will give consumers a positive perception of your brand – building trust or loyalty in the process.

What does it take to create the best summer marketing campaigns? Let’s take a look at the seven essential steps to developing a campaign that earns a solid seasonal return on investment (ROI).

To ensure your summer marketing campaign messaging hits the mark (and offers genuine value), you have to know your audience and their motivations.

Without knowing who you’re speaking to and why, your campaign is unlikely to cut through the seasonal noise. To give your summer campaign definitive direction, defining your seasonal buyer personas is essential.

Humanize your buyer personas by giving them a name and adding demographic detail including: 

• Age 
• Gender
• Marital status
• Occupation
• Location
• Income
• Personal interests
• Key pain points

Once you’ve defined your campaign personas, you should decide how your products will solve their pain points or, at the very least – make their summer better.

For instance, if you’re a natural sunscreen brand and your persona is a time-poor working parent, you could base your campaign on your range of vibrantly packaged, easy spray products.

Setting your goals is another critical piece of the summer marketing campaign puzzle. When setting your summer campaign objectives, it’s important to be as specific as possible (use the SMART objectives model to be even more thorough).

For example, instead of stating, ‘we want to sell more of our kids’ sunscreen line this summer’, be more specific by saying, ‘we want to achieve a 40% increase in our kids’ sunscreen sales online’ and earn 25% extra brand engagement between June and September.’

By setting clear goals, you’ll give yourself actionable milestones that you can use to build and develop your campaign around.

With your audience defined and your goals set, you’ll want to create a catchy campaign hook that turns heads and stops people scrolling in their tracks.

A well-crafted hook will bring your summer campaign to life, give your audience a clear reason to engage, and give you a definitive blueprint for your content and communications.

A strong hook is more than just a slogan – it’s a concept that will give your summer campaign’s real seasonal value.

Here are some tips for creating an attention-worthy hook for your summer marketing campaign:

1. Lead with the main benefit your summer campaign offers or the key problem it solves.
2. Choose a hook that aligns with your campaign’s main goal.
3. Speak in your customers’ language and use words that will inspire them to engage with your investment in what you have to offer.
4. Inject your brand’s personality and tone of voice in your campaign hook and messaging. Doing so will humanize your messaging and make your content more memorable.
5. Use the sunny visuals and light-hearted vibes of the summer season as a basis for your campaign hook (and campaign messaging)

Using our kids’ sunscreen line example, here are a few campaign hooks that could work well:

No fuss. No mess. No sunburn. Just spray and play all day. Here’s to a safe and successful summer.

This hook focuses on the benefit and the solution. It also uses punchy, memorable language and leans on a concept that will steer the rest of the campaign content.

Using the right tools will help you create effective campaign content, distribute it across channels effectively, and track your success accurately.

These days, a host of generative AI and automation tools exist to assist with everything from research and content creation to insight discovery and data analysis. To help you assemble your summer marketing campaign toolkit, here’s a checklist you can use as a guide.

Your summer marketing campaign toolkit checklist

• Generative AI tools like Google Gemini or ChatGPT for content research and creation
• Social media scheduling tools like Planable or Hootsuite for sharing content across platforms
• Email marketing tools like MailChimp or Zoho or  to create content, automate delivery and responses, and monitor performance
• Data analytics tools like Google Analytics, Tableau pulse or Akkio for campaign performance analysis and consumer behavior tracking

Top tip: Explore our ‘ChatGPT prompt guide for your digital marketing plan’ and learn how to use the platform to generate summer marketing campaign ideas and help shape your content.

With your hook and toolkit established, you’ll be ready to start creating your campaign content.

Before creating your content, you should decide which channels you’ll use for publishing and distribution. You should also make a content calendar that outlines the type of content you’ll create for each channel and when you want to publish it. 

You can use our handy content calendar template to map out your campaign content distribution plan template and ensure your communications are published across platforms consistently. It’s also important to establish who is responsible for creating and distributing each piece of content.

Take the time to do this before you start creating and your summer marketing campaign will not only run smoothly – but make a solid impact across channels.

You should always create content that aligns with your main campaign hook and speaks directly to your audience. Tailor your content to each channel (keep in mind the nature of the platform and any character limits or restrictions) and create your main campaign assets first.

Based on our ‘spray and play’ sunscreen campaign hook, for instance, your main assets will be:

• A one-minute YouTube video/video-based ad
• A fun-filled downloadable visual guide to show kids how to apply their sunscreen safely

Once you’ve made your campaign assets, you’ll plan supplementary multi-channel content to promote and distribute your assets:

• A small series of articles and blog posts to promote your video and downloadable asset. These can come in the form of a ‘sun safety’ infographic or a guide to ‘encouraging kids to apply sunscreen during the summer’ for example
• An email series to promote the campaign and present your product range to your audience (complete with tailored deals and incentives)
• A landing page to plug your summer campaign and your product range. This is essential as it will give potential consumers an actionable place to click through to when engaging with a campaign ad or piece of email content
• Ad copy and imagery to promote your campaign content and product range
• Social media copy and imagery to promote your campaign content and product range

Top tip: Use content pillars to categorize and streamline your content into key themes or topics so you create the content that you know your audience wants to read. 

Many brands and marketers overlook this, but it’s essential: you should always take the time to engage and interact with your audience during your campaign.

During summer especially, consumers are likely to be feeling receptive and positive . Responding to social media posts and comments will bring them closer to your brand, improve your visibility, and result in better outcomes.

You can use social listening techniques (and tools) to monitor any conversations related to your brand or your campaign content. Creating a dedicated hashtag for your summer campaign (#sprayandplaysummer, for example) will improve your social media reach and help you track relevant conversations across platforms.

Remember, marketing is a conversation  – a two way street  – so take the time to engage and interact with your audience. Doing so will certainly pay off!

Finally, you should track and measure your campaign’s performance. Circling back to our ‘summer marketing campaign toolkit checklist’ for a moment, you should use analytics tools to uncover what works best and what doesn’t.

Tracking relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) such as content marketing and metrics will provide the insight you need to optimize your content for success and improve your future seasonal marketing campaigns.

Top tip: Work through our guide to content marketing metrics and create a plan for measuring and analyzing your campaign performance across channels.

There’s no better or faster way to break into the digital industry and sharpen up your seasonal marketing skills than with a digital marketing certification. DMI’s certified and industry aligned Professional Diploma in Digital Marketing will teach you the fundamentals of digital marketing, show you how to leverage AI in your marketing activities and simple ways to cultivate soft skills. You’ll also explore key channels such as email marketing, social media, SEO, content marketing, and display and video advertising to execute successful marketing campaigns in any industry.