The period from June to July sees a significant dip in performance for B2B content downloads, webinar attendance, and high-ticket consumer sales. This slump, caused by summer travel and school holidays, is comparable only to the major Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday seasons. Marketers should anticipate this and adjust their expectations and strategies accordingly, as it's a difficult time to market for everyone.

For seasonal offers like a gardening course, create a marketing "runway" that begins when customers are in their planning phase. This allows you to build an audience and nurture leads with relevant freebies (e.g., a garden planning guide) before the peak season's real urgency kicks in.

The advent calendar concept is being decoupled from Christmas and applied to other occasions like Halloween, Mother's Day, and birthdays. This transforms a seasonal novelty into a year-round marketing strategy, creating new consumer habits of anticipation and driving sales for various events.

This three-week period is one of the worst-performing times for webinar attendance, B2B content downloads, and high-ticket consumer sales. Its performance dip is comparable to Thanksgiving and Christmas, driven by summer travel and school holidays, making it a critical time to adjust marketing expectations and strategy.

Consumers are no longer a monolith; they simultaneously seek deals, reduce spending, or pay a premium for specific items. Single-path strategies will fail. Retailers must adopt scenario-based planning to cater to these diverse and often conflicting behaviors when planning inventory, pricing, and messaging.

'Early access' marketing, where promotions begin far in advance of an event or season, is a major trend. It has grown 35% year-over-year across both business and consumer categories, showing a significant shift toward earlier campaign launches.

A business with seasonal demand can create a full-year content calendar by framing campaigns around the lead-up to, the peak of, and the aftermath of their busy season. This pre, during, and post messaging cycle creates continuous relevance and multiple touchpoints for customers.

To avoid skyrocketing CPMs and intense competition during the traditional Black Friday week, Comfort launches its holiday sales campaign on October 15th. The strategy is to be first to market, capture budget from early shoppers, and build momentum before every other brand starts their promotions.

Offering discounts early in the quarter doesn't accelerate deals. It signals that better terms will be available later, incentivizing buyers to delay until the last possible minute to maximize their leverage, thus slowing the sales cycle.