Seasonal content can be a boon for your business: it enables you to connect with your audience and trends within your industry. It’s also something that you can plan and schedule well in advance of its publishing date.

The soccer world cup happens every four years and while you don’t need nearly half a decade of planning, its set dates for action mean you have an opportunity to get your seasonal content in place well ahead of its arrival and make the most of this global event.

Below I have outlined how your business can make the most of the 2018 Soccer World Cup.

What is seasonal content?

Seasonal content is content which relates to an event, holiday, or season. It can be industry specific, or something more general which might have a much wider audience interest. Some of the many examples of seasonal content include:

• Christmas
• Elections
• Historical anniversaries
• Industry conventions
• Sporting events

The important thing to remember when marking out the events you wish to approach as seasonal content, is to think about what is relevant for your customers – what ‘seasons’ are important to them?

You might already have a list of events in mind; if you don’t, then start thinking about them now and keep a note them.

How does seasonal content benefit you?

Engagement is what every marketer seeks from their campaigns and what every business hopes to achieve with their audience. Producing trending content is a dream scenario for customer engagement, as you can capture the interest of a captive audience.

However, while trends are unpredictable, seasons are not; the benefit of seasonal content is you know the moments when your audience want to hear about specific topics. As a result, you can design your strategy to produce content that they are more likely to engage with.

Why is this important? Engaged customers spend 60% more per transaction and are more likely to become long-term customers. By producing seasonal content you can increase the ROI for you business now and into the future.

Why seasonal content for the soccer World Cup will help your business

The soccer World Cup is an event that engages people like few others:

• 2 billion people watched the 2014 World Cup – 1 billion watched the final
• 280 million people watched the 2014 World Cup on a mobile device or online
• 2 billion people watched the 2010 World Cup – 909.6 million watched the final

Billions are expected to watch the 2018 World Cup, and across a variety of platforms.

It’s not just the sheer numbers that make the soccer world cup an example of seasonal content you can’t miss out on, there’s the emotional connection too.

Liverpool are one of soccer’s most successful clubs and one of their highest achieving managers, Bill Shankly, had this to say about the emotional importance attached to the sport:

“Some people think football [soccer] is a matter of life and death. I don’t like that attitude. I can assure them it is much more serious than that.”

If you want to engage your audience then your business simply cannot miss the opportunity to produce seasonal content for the 2018 soccer world cup.

What content should you produce?

The type of content you produce will be influenced by whether your nation is competing at the 2018 soccer World Cup. If they are then you want to play on feelings of national pride, emphasising the unique characteristics of your country.

This advert by Banco de Chile is an outstanding example of how to tap into the mindset of your nation’s fans.

Featuring the miners trapped in the 2010 Copiapó mining accident, it makes light of the supposed group of death that the Chilean team had been put into at the 2014 soccer world cup, with its central message: “Nothing is Impossible for a Chilean.”

If your nation is not competing then you should focus on the shared passion and excitement that comes from watching the tournament, just like this advert from KFC does…

Credit: Campaign

Using passion and pride as your starting point, you need to think about the types of content your audience will want. Once you have that sussed, there an enormous number of different types of content you can produce:

• A list of your nation’s greatest players
• A “how to” guide on preparing for the world cup
• A run through of the best places to watch the world cup
• A look at the host nation and how they have got their country ready to stage the tournament

You should also think about what channels you want to prioritise – your website, your social media accounts, your email newsletters.

And one of the other factors that you should consider is timing…

How to use scheduling

The soccer world cup happens every 4 years and is held from June to July. It’s during these two months that interest in the tournament spikes…

Credit: Google Trends

One of the great things about the soccer world cup for your business is that it’s dates are released well in advance of the tournament kicking off.

This is great if you are an online business because you can make use of scheduling/automation tools to get your content out at the best times to achieve maximum engagement.

Being able to queue up your content to send it out at the right time is a massive time-saver for your seasonal content. MailChimp is a marketing automation platform that you can add to your ecommerce business. It enables you to schedule range of different marketing functions, such as sending automated emails.

Another way that you can save time is through an editorial calendar. CoSchedule is a social plugin for WordPress. The brilliant thing about it is that it allows you to organize your content days, weeks, months, or years ahead of their publishing date, enabling you to make the most of engagement spikes.

Seasonal content is a brilliant way for your business to tap into your customers engagement levels when you know they are at their height. The soccer world cup is an enormously popular event and represents a huge opportunity for your business to connect with your customers from June to July 2018.

So, establish what content your customers want to read, then plan out your editorial calendar and make use of your available platforms and automation tools to bring your businesses name to a captive audience. Your next trick will be to turn these seasonal shoppers into lifelong customers.

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