The Spring Marketing Guide for Your B2B Content Campaigns

When putting together your spring marketing calendar, you may  find that there’s not much happening this time of year. With few major holidays or events, it can be seen as a slow time. With a great content strategy, however, you can still drive brand impressions and sales—with Forrester forecasting U.S. B2B eCommerce to be a $1.8 trillion industry by 2023, there’s plenty of opportunity. 

What’s more, seasonal content and themes related to specific dates, events, and holidays let you provide a more personalized experience over evergreen or promotional content. Salesforce  found that 89 percent of business buyers feel that an experience a company provides is just as important as its products and services.

It’s up to you to make the most of this time of year. Use our spring marketing guide as a blueprint to create your new strategies during the season of renewal.  

Keep Reading: Blog Strategy and Seasonal Content: What You Need to Know

The spring season starts with the spring equinox and ends with the summer solstice. In 2020, that’s March 19 – June 20. While some feel like spring is whenever the weather turns warm, and summer starts with Memorial Day Weekend, you can generally follow whichever guidelines work for your individual business and vertical. 

Below are holidays and dates that you can use in your spring marketing campaigns or promote with social media content.  

Visuals are critical if you want to drive engagement. Contently found that 75 percent of marketers see a better ROI when they include visuals with their content.

Spring is all about bright colors, floral and growth-related imagery, and energetic motifs. While you might not be able to embrace flowers in your spring marketing campaign, you can take some inspiration from the following creative themes!  

Keep Reading: How to Use Visual Marketing to Differentiate Your Content

While staying within your branding guidelines, consider how you can incorporate some bright colors or accents into your spring marketing to match the blooming season outdoors. Don’t go overboard with neon hues (save that for summer); think more of pale and pastel tones. For help, refer to this Hubspot guide with some color combinations for inspration (look to #6, 7, 12, or 18). 

With growth as a major theme of spring, floral and plant visuals are a natural accompaniment to your campaigns. If the traditional blooming images don’t fit within your brand style, consider using the “moody floral” design trend. 

Everyone is full of energy and enthusiasm after a long winter and you can get energetic and lively with font choices too. While staying within your branding guide, you can include a complimentary brush script or hand-drawn text. 

Check out these options from Filtergrade for inspiration and then bring a special font into graphics as a header or stand-out content element to leverage the seasonality.   

There are so many content pieces you can create related to spring holidays and themes. If you’re feeling uninspired, use these ideas to get some creative brainstorming flowing.

Taxes are due on April 15, which means this is a good time for financial organizations to talk about finances, share their expertise, and provide valuable insights and guides for business owners.

Example: Blog guide and email campaign. Create a blog post that guides your customers through some aspect of tax season. Break that blog post out into a series of content-based emails, sending those tips right to your customers’ inbox.

Spring cleaning is an obvious concept to bring into your marketing because everyone knows what it means. Not to mention, it can be used in reference to many topics and industries.

Example: Bring an old piece of content out of the vault and re-promote it with the “spring-cleaning” spin. For example, at JTC, we’ll share this blog post on how to perform a content audit as a spring cleaning task for content creators.

Spring is all about renewal and revitalization. Bring a “new season, new you” angle to your content marketing to encourage customers and clients to act. 

Example: This is the perfect theme to encourage customers and clients to renew their service or contracts, or better yet, upgrade for an even better year. Offer spring-related discounts to encourage early renewals, like SPRING2020.

There are so many people to celebrate during the spring with official holidays, like Women’s History Month, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and LGBTQ Pride Month. Use this as a chance to appeal to your entire audience and show that you care.

Example: Find people within your organization that may have a tie to one for the major holidays and share their stories via blog post or social media post. This is a powerful gesture that allows you to connect deeper with your audience and employees.

After many long months spent inside, winter thaw means that all minds turn to the outdoors! Playing off the change in weather, spring gardening, and even Earth Day on April 22, bring some environmental-related themes into your content marketing where appropriate. 

Example: This is the perfect time of year to promote your business’s sustainability practices. A 2019 report found that 47 percent of Internet users said they had switched to a new product or service because a service or company violated their personal values—and protecting the environment was the top value referenced. Share a video of employees or your CEO talking about why sustainability is important to the business all year long to show customers and clients that you’re on the same page as them.

It’s fun to bring in new colors, fonts and messaging during different seasons, but don’t forget to stay focused and true to your brand. Promote seasonal and relevant content, celebrate big holidays alongside customers and clients, and use this Spring as a chance to show your true colors.

Feature image: Crystal Petersen