3 Ways To Let Your Seasonal Energies Guide Your Marketing – A Guest Post From Astrid Bracke

If you run a business in which you sell most at certain times of the year—Christmas, the beginning of the school year or during the summer—you will be no stranger to seasonal marketing.

But seasonal marketing can also take other shapes and forms, both in response to the turning of the natural seasons in the world around us, as well as our own seasons.

In this post, small business mentor Astrid Bracke shares 3 ways in which you can let your own seasonal energies guide you for slower, gentler and more intentional marketing.

Outer and inner seasons

In thinking seasonally, we can distinguish between outer and inner seasons. The outer seasons might determine how much time we spend outdoors or indoors, how much energy we feel, what kind of work we feel drawn to.

I certainly feel this myself. I feel most drawn to working behind the scenes in my business in summer and winter: in summer because its sheer headiness tends to overwhelm me, in winter because I appreciate the sense of hibernating that makes me want to be less outward facing. In spring and autumn on the other hand, I tend to do the bigger launches in my business. Having spent summer and winter working behind the scenes, dreaming up and creating new offers, in spring and autumn I tend to feel the energy, focus and stamina to be more outward-facing for longer periods of time.

You might also have other kinds of outer seasons in your life: for instance, if you have children, the school year might dictate your seasons, making the summer a naturally slower time for you, and gearing up once the kids are back at school.

But we also have inner seasons, which may correspond to a smaller or larger degree to the outer seasons, but can also be separate from it. You might feel less energy during certain times of the year, experience mood fluctuations or grief around the anniversary of a certain event.

Your energy and brainspace might fluctuate wildly within the month—as I experienced before I finally received adequate treatment for PMDD—or even over the course of a week, for instance if you work a job next to your business. As a small business mentor, I only have client calls on Tuesdays and Thursdays, leaving Fridays for writing and creating—more inward and focused work.

While some of these energy patterns might be predictable, others don’t, as many of the clients I work with experience. Whether it’s because of a chronic condition or illness, or simply because you’re human, these patterns of energy and motivation influence how we show up for and in our business, including our marketing.

Recognising and working with our own seasons or patterns is a foundational part of my marketing programme Grow. In fact, I named it Grow because of the organic connotations of the word. Grow is defined as referring to “(of a living thing) undergo natural development by increasing in size and changing physically.” Its roots are in Od English grōwan, which originally chiefly referred to plants, and is related to the words ‘grass’ and ‘green’.

What’s more, the kind of intentional and gentle marketing I teach in Grow has led to equally intentional, gentle and sustainable growth in my business.

So many of the small business owners, freelancers and creatives I speak to burn out from marketing because they follow someone else’s rules. As well-meaning as these marketing experts no doubt are, I’ve seen time and time again that while we can learn from other people and pick up examples and practices along the way, we need to develop our own strategy.

Marketing is like everything in business and in life: it needs to fit with you, with your needs and desires, with your strengths and joys, with your energy and seasons.

When I decided to shift my marketing in 2021 I did so largely out of frustration. I was simply done with following other people’s rules, content calendars and plans (and being on social media). I did something I hadn’t thought possible until then. I started marketing exactly, and only, in a way that felt good to me. I chose platforms that allowed me to do lots of writing—which is one of my biggest strengths and joys. I let go of fast-moving and ephemeral types of marketing where I could never keep up, and chose longer lasting and evergreen forms instead, like Pinterest and SEO.

And it has paid off. My current way of marketing is effective and sustainable because I made the rules and because it allows me to follow the rhythms of my own seasons.

3 ways of adding more seasonality to your marketing

1. Recognise your own seasons. How do you mentally, physically and emotionally respond to the outer seasons in your life? When do you feel drawn to being more outward-focused in your business, and when to working more behind-the-scenes? Which inner seasons can you identify? Are there times of year when you feel less or more energised? Do you need to do less or no marketing at certain times of the month? Are certain days of the week best suited to marketing activities? Or are your energy levels unpredictable? That’s okay too, you can work with that.
2. Add more spaciousness to your marketing. None of us are robots, and even those of us who know very well what their energy patterns are might be surprised from time to time. Or you might have to deal with an unexpected situation in life, a surprising opportunity in business, or simply fall ill. Embracing seasonality in our businesses means having the space to deal with events like these. The kind of marketing I support my clients with and that I teach in Grow allows us to embrace our humanness.
3. Scale down and scale up. Even though my marketing is fairly minimal, I’ve had times in which I’ve chosen, or had to, scale down. A long period of illness led me to not being able to do any marketing at all. A summer vacation meant that I deliberately sent out fewer newsletters. And there are times when I scale up in my business if I have the capacity to do so, especially during launches. In Grow making a plan for scaling down and scaling up is an explicit part of creating your marketing strategy. We need to be able to scale down when we need to, to take out platforms or channels, outsource (like I do with uploading blogposts and creating pins, which Laura does for me), or have evergreen marketing ticking along in the background.

Which of these ways of adding more seasonality to your marketing will you experiment with first?

Grow is my 4-month hybrid group programme in which I support you to market intentionally and confidently, in a way that is all you. Grow is truly designed with your humanness in mind. Not only is the programme hybrid, creating a balance of accountability and working at your own pace, the marketing strategy I teach you is rooted in you, in your business, in your life.

Grow will run from 15 March to 15 July 2025, and is for sale from February 27th to March 14th. And, if you join the waitlist, you get a 10% discount during the early-bird window (24-26 February), and some of my favourite marketing bonuses.

Find out more on the sales page, or send me a message with any questions you might have. I’d love to welcome you to the programme!