UK Snow arrived during the first weekend of February 2012 gracing the UK with temperatures plummeting across the country and bringing public transport to a standstill with Heathrow having to take the decision of cancelling flights.
For online retailers, the arrival of UK snow provides a time to think creatively in promoting their product range to capitalise on the impact of a return to colder temperatures. Lessons were learnt from December 2010 when the UK experienced the coldest winter on record and with it, a number of examples of retailers utilising the extreme weather conditions to assist with their online marketing tactics to fuel additional sales.
Analysing the cold spell of 2012, Google trends provides an interesting snapshot in the increase in searches associated with “snow” at the tail end of 2011 and moving into the New Year as provided in the chart below. The chart refers to UK searches:
For online retail, the return of the cold weather provides a perfect time to push their product range associated with cold weather – an example of one such retailer to do this was through an email campaign received over the weekend from Men’s clothing retailer, Samuel Windsor with the headline on “Beat the Big Freeze”
For other online retailers, this is a perfect opportunity to capitalise on the extreme winter weather to also push their product range, retailers such as clothing, sporting goods and in house entertainment (as people decide to remain at home and opt for DVD/Music entertainment).
With this in mind, below are a few digital marketing tactics online retailers could embrace to maximise their sales opportunities during the winter weather:
*Google Adwords – Current analysis of the competition for weather related keywords within adwords suggests a low competition i.e. there is minimum bid activity on some key search terms. Below is an image for generic “snow” related search terms – notice there is no PPC bidding activity around these terms – a perfect opportunity for a retailer to capitalise on a tactical adwords campaign?
For clothing retailers looking to target their product range (e.g. ski jackets, overcoats, scarves, hats) this is a perfect opportunity to promote their products and capitalise on the growing trend for searches associated with “snow” related keywords and phrases.
*SEO – Similar to an adwords campaign, retailers should look to create an optimised web page to use as a tactical promotion to target keywords and phrases. *Twitter – A tactical tool to target users and collaborate with other retailers/news sites by promoting your product range around relevant hashtags (e.g. #snow) Listed below is for Tweets associated with the snow
*Affiliates – Optimise your product feed/banner inventory associated with cold weather/snow to reach out to affiliates with your relevant range of products. A timely promotion but something your pool of affiliates could engage with in promoting a targeted range of products.
These are just a few suggestions on how to create a digital marketing strategy associated with the weather impacts, for further reading I would recommend an industry post by Econsultancy that lists in detail on how online marketers can adapt to the weather










It’s the middle of winter, it’s cold, it’s damp and it’s miserable.