A synergized ‘key sales period’ strategy: Maximizing performance at peak times

Linking up digital PR link-building strategies with technical and on-site search engine optimization (SEO) and paid media in unison is a formula for this kind of success, but how can you take things up a notch to capitalize on key sales periods for your brand?

There are a few things to get right: timing, strategy alignment, getting ahead of competitors, overcoming media saturation, collaborating across channels, and measuring success for each department.

1. Timeframes

Knowing your brand’s key sales periods will allow you to plan ahead. At the start of each year, analyze sales data from the previous year, to see if there are any trends or spikes in revenue for products, services or categories. Once you know the weeks or months that were pivotal to your success, ensure the full team has them in their calendars.

In many cases, peak sales times are obvious – based on seasonal, cultural, political or financial events. In these cases, plan based on successes and challenges from the previous year. Depending on the creativity and scale of your creative output, planning should start between three and six months before the event, to give your team optimum time to prepare.

2. Strategy alignment

Next, decide on key objectives, whether that’s to beat last year’s revenue, grow visibility, overcome a competitor, or to sell a specific volume of products. Then core alignment can begin: how are you going to boost and synergize each channel?

Your digital PR and SEO teams should be working together throughout this process. Identify the priority pages and categories on-site to inform an outreach strategy. Keywords, clicks, conversions, and general page views can help determine which areas to focus on. Then you need to tailor a strategy for each to maximize performance.

Digital PR campaign ideation should be versatile, and inclusive of keywords. Always ensure you include backlinks to the target category and product pages to maximize visibility, and outreach to relevant publications to get the most SEO value from any links.

Outreach a hero campaign to tell the full story that encompasses the brand message, as well ‘proactives’ to drive further targeted backlinks. Always be reactive to keep your brand current and in the spotlight. Paid media insights such as trending products, audience insights and changes in search behavior can help feed back to proactive campaigns to keep up relevancy. Finally, include a product or service press release in your outreach for super-relevant round-ups pieces.

3. Media saturation

During key sales periods, your competitors will be trying to do the same things, making the landscape extremely saturated. Keep a close eye on them throughout the year, and look at their activity during the previous sales period to try and gauge their approaches.

Check competitors’ traffic share of keywords, research the types of campaign they are outreaching, identify their approach on social media, and review their impression share in pay-per-click (PPC). Once you have an idea of their strategy, use your ideation sessions to determine the areas of focus, whether that’s further competing on keywords, doing a link intersect to find the sites they have links (where you lack them), or identifying areas in PPC where competitor depth isn’t as competitive.

4. Results

A successful key sales period will depend on your core objectives. This may be beating last year’s performance or outperforming a competitor. However, there are also key indicators to report on to showcase the synergized approach of your channels – visibility growth; the number of products or services sold; revenue; traffic share to keywords; and return on ad spend. Keep a close eye on all of them to ensure you remain competitive.

For more deep analysis of the heroes and villains of retail in 2024, head over to our focus week hub.