How to plan for seasonality & promotions

Lifesight offers a suite of advanced tools to help you strategically plan and optimize the timing of your holidays and promotions. With features like Event Impact Summary, Forecaster, and Optimizer, you can gain valuable insights into how past campaigns have influenced your business, predict future outcomes, and fine-tune your marketing strategies for better results.

Tools to Elevate Your Holiday & Promotion Planning

1. Event Impact Summary: Review Past Campaign Success

The Event Impact Summary feature allows you to analyze the effectiveness of previous holidays and promotions. This tool helps you understand the true impact of these events by highlighting their performance beyond your marketing spend, giving you a clearer picture of their contribution.

Key Insights:

• Promotion Impact: Determine if a promotion genuinely drove sales growth or simply shifted sales from other periods, helping you avoid cannibalization.
• Marketing Attribution: Discover how much of your results came directly from the promotion itself compared to your marketing activities.
• Post-Campaign Insights: Analyze the effect of past events on your overall business performance and apply these learnings to optimize future campaigns.

2. Forecaster: Anticipate Future Trends

The Forecaster tool enables you to project the potential impact of upcoming holidays or promotions. By adding, modifying, or removing event impacts (periods expected to cause significant changes in performance), you can estimate how these events will affect your key performance indicators like sales or engagement.

How to Use:

• Add Future Events: Utilize the tool to introduce events for upcoming holidays or promotions, allowing you to forecast their potential influence on your business.
• Optimize Dates: Experiment with different dates to schedule your promotions when they are expected to deliver the strongest results.
• Strategic Planning: Plan around event impacts to decide whether you should align new promotions with holidays or other key moments in the market for maximum impact.

3. Optimizer: Enhance Your Marketing Efficiency

With the Optimizer tool, you can adjust the timing of future event impacts and let the platform find the best combination and timing of your marketing spend. The Optimizer takes into account holidays, promotions, and other important events, ensuring you allocate your budget where it will be most effective.

Key Features:

• Automated Optimization: The Optimizer suggests the most efficient allocation of your marketing budget, taking into consideration the timing of holidays, promotions, and key events.
• Scenario Planning: Modify the dates of your planned promotions, and the Optimizer will adjust your marketing strategy accordingly, providing insights into the best spend allocation for different scenarios.
• Increased ROI: Use the Optimizer to reduce wasteful spend, ensuring that your budget is focused on the periods that deliver the highest return on investment, especially during key promotional windows.

Best Practices for Holiday & Promotion Planning

• Leverage Historical Insights: Before planning a new promotion, use the Event Impact Summary to assess how similar past events performed. This can help you refine your approach and set realistic expectations.
• Explore Different Scenarios: Use the Forecaster to test a variety of dates and event combinations to better predict outcomes, helping you refine the timing of your promotions for maximum success.
• Maximize Efficiency: Always utilize the Optimizer to ensure your marketing spend is deployed most efficiently. This allows you to avoid overspending during periods of high organic traffic and focus your budget when it can drive the most value.

By using Lifesight’s Event Impact Summary, Forecaster, and Optimizer tools, you’ll enhance your ability to plan and execute successful holiday and promotional campaigns, leading to smarter marketing strategies and improved returns.