In this article…
Summer may be vacation season for consumers, but it’s go time for marketers. Between holiday weekends, travel season, and changing shopping habits, the pressure is on to deliver campaigns that land and convert.
If you’re feeling behind, you’re not alone. Many marketers face the same challenge every year: How do you actually use the customer data you have to fuel high-impact, seasonal marketing? And how do you ensure your brand shows up in front of the right people in the right place before the competition beats you to it?
That’s where Experian comes in. With Experian’s advanced Audience solutions, you can get ahead of the trends, connect with vacation-ready shoppers, and optimize performance across digital, TV, and retail media using customer data for seasonal marketing.
Capitalize on vacation excitement to drive sales and growth
Summer travel often triggers a surge in pre-trip spending. Surveys show that 82% of consumers plan to travel this summer, and according to Fortune, today’s travelers spend thousands of dollars on things like luggage, apparel, and recreation gear before they even leave their homes!
But while consumer demand is heating up, so are the challenges. Marketers are navigating a turbulent economic environment shaped by shifting demand curves, tighter budgets, the rising cost of goods, and supply chain disruptions caused by newly imposed tariffs. These pressures are forcing teams to rethink everything from product positioning to pricing strategies.
In this climate, it’s more important than ever to maximize performance, reduce waste, and stay laser-focused on reaching high-intent audiences likely to convert. Using customer data for seasonal marketing helps brands predict and capture demand with precise, relevant targeting. Whether your customers are planning a trip to the beach or hiking the Rockies, timely messaging and audience alignment can drive engagement and conversion.
Experian Audiences power effective audience strategies
But even the most compelling campaigns can fall flat if you’re working with incomplete data, outdated segments, or generic targeting. Consumer data providers like Experian can help you fix that.
Our Audience solutions help you go beyond assumptions and truly understand who your shoppers are, what they’re planning, and how they behave, so you’re ready to get in front of their summer plans.
Six steps to creating a successful seasonal marketing campaign
When you’re ready to turn summer intent into strategy, Experian Audience solutions help you translate vacation-driven behaviors into high-performing campaigns. Each product in the Experian Audience suite supports a specific stage in seasonal marketing planning and execution.
1. Define your goals
Before diving into channels and creatives, get clear on your customer database marketing goals. Are you trying to increase online purchases? Drive in-store traffic? Expand brand awareness?
Use Syndicated Audiences to set fast, focused goals. If you’re short on time, Experian’s 2,400+ Syndicated Audiences give you a head start. These pre-built, behavior-based segments — from luxury travelers to seasonal sports enthusiasts — help you quickly identify who to target, where they spend time, and how to message to them.
With segments ready to plug into 30+ activation platforms, you can ensure quick, confident activation.
2. Decide what data you need and which audiences to target
Using customer data for seasonal marketing means mapping behavior to intent. This core tactic in customer database marketing can help you drive deeper engagement. Our data solutions simplify the process, whether you’re starting with limited data or already know your best customers.
- If you’re starting with a list, Enrichment can append lifestyle, income, and travel preference data to help you understand what motivates your existing customers.
- If you don’t have a list, Marketing Attributes gives you full control when building new audiences or lookalikes based on relevant seasonal traits like beach vacationers or frequent CTV watchers.
3. Identify key holidays and events
Summer is full of shopping triggers: Memorial Day, Father’s Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, and countless local and regional events. However, not every customer behaves the same way.
Use Enrichment to understand when your customers are most likely to act. By comparing your first-party data to broader market segments, you can time promotions more strategically. For instance, enrichment might reveal that outdoor gear buyers convert in early June, while luxury travelers plan closer to July.
4. Activate across digital, TV, and retail media
Summer shoppers don’t stick to one screen. They’re streaming TV, reading travel blogs, browsing retail apps, and catching up on email — often from a beach chair or airplane seat. That’s why omnichannel delivery is a must, and it’s where consumer data vendors like Experian can help you reach your audience across channels with targeted messaging for key holidays and events:
- Syndicated Audiences simplifies omnichannel activation with built-in integrations to 30+ leading activation platforms. These pre-mapped segments let you deliver consistent messaging across the places where your audience is most engaged.
- Looking for privacy-forward reach? Contextually-Indexed Audiences are segments built by linking real-world behavioral data to the types of content those audiences typically consume online, allowing you to activate based on content instead of identity while offering a more contextually relevant experience. Using customer data for seasonal marketing, Experian maps real audience segments across web and app environments — like national park guides and travel blogs — for ID-free precision targeting in a cookieless environment.
5. Track and evaluate performance
Don’t wait until the end of the campaign to make changes. Experian’s measurement tools help you track performance in real time, so you can optimize early and often.
Measure how well specific audiences — enriched, syndicated, or contextual — are performing across platforms and use those insights to shift spend toward top performers.
6. Optimize and refine your strategy
After the season ends, it’s time to take what you’ve learned and build smarter for the next push.
Use Outcomes to analyze:
- Who converted
- Which segments underperformed
- How your customer base compares to the broader market
- How your audience evolved
- Which campaigns drove meaningful adoption
These insights can then inform your next round of audience building, so whether it’s back-to-school or a holiday, you’re already ahead.
Example 1: The beach vacation shopper
To illustrate Experian’s Audience solutions at work, let’s say a high-end swimsuit brand wants to reach women over 30 planning beach vacations to Florida, Hawaii, or Mexico. However, their CRM only includes basic transaction and purchase details and offers little insight into who their customers are.
Audience solution: Enrichment
Using Experian’s Enrichment solution, the brand could layer on lifestyle, income, and travel preference data to turn shallow profiles into rich audience segments.
With a deeper understanding of their shoppers, the brand could develop a targeted messaging strategy by destination, build high-performing lookalike audiences, and confidently activate across channels.
Example 2: The European traveler
As another example, suppose a footwear brand wants to reach millennial travelers heading to Europe between May and August. They specialize in stylish, comfortable walking shoes that are ideal for travel but lack the technical in-house resources to build custom segments.
Audience solution: Syndicated Audiences
Using our Syndicated Audiences, the brand could easily tap into pre-built segments tied to leisure travelers, international shoppers, and comfort-focused footwear buyers. With plug-and-play access to over 2,400 verified audience segments, the brand could quickly layer this targeting into their programmatic and paid social campaigns without requiring custom development.
And with fast speed-to-market and improved message relevance, the brand could launch cross-channel campaigns just in time for peak summer travel planning.
Example 3: The outdoorsman
Consider a camping tent company that wants to reach families planning summer trips to national parks, campgrounds, or RV resorts. They don’t have much first-party data to work with, but they know their audience is online, researching their next adventure.
Audience solution: Contextually-Indexed Audiences
With Experian’s Contextually-Indexed Audiences, the brand could target people actively reading content about outdoor travel (like hiking tips, campground reviews, or road trip itineraries) without relying on cookies or IDs. They’d be able to activate contextually relevant audiences mapped to sites that outdoor enthusiasts frequent and drive site traffic with strong click-through rates.
Example 4: Big-box retailer launching summer gear
Imagine a national retailer preparing to promote summer essentials like patio furniture, grills, fitness gear, and travel accessories. Their goal is to build predictive models for their summer product demand and reach new customers most likely to buy before they even search.
Audience solution: Marketing Attributes
With Experian’s Marketing Attributes, the retailer could license over 5,000 lifestyle, demographic, and behavioral variables to enrich internal models and uncover high-indexing consumer groups, such as outdoor entertainers or health-conscious families.
This data-powered insight would help them predict demand and identify audience segments worth testing across media channels. The team could find new, qualified segments ideal for email and CTV activation and get a head start on the season, eventually increasing ROI on their summer campaign spend.
Talk to Experian about your summer campaigns today
Using customer data for marketing doesn’t have to be overwhelming, especially when you have access to a trusted consumer data provider and plug-and-play audience tools for every stage of the funnel.
Whether you’re working with a robust CRM or starting fresh, consumer data vendors like Experian can help you reach the right audiences with speed, accuracy, and confidence. Our advanced tools are designed for both advanced marketers and teams just beginning to explore consumer database marketing. No matter your goals, Experian is here to help you build an audience strategy that performs.
Contact us today
Latest posts
Experian kicks off the AdTech year at CES What better way to jump-start start 2023 than a trip to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Our team was thrilled to participate in this annual kick-off with the AdTech community. The uniqueness of what CES has become for our industry can be defined as the intersection between technology brands, digital, television, and AdTech. CES creates the space necessary for marketing and advertising leaders to collaborate to drive rewarding outcomes for the year ahead. Our goal in attending CES was to connect with our partners, clients, and industry leaders to build relationships, form strategic plans, and listen. The opportunity to learn about our industry’s challenges and goals enables us to develop initiatives, drive success, and support our clients and partners. Keep reading for our 2023 CES AdTech recap. “I have been to CES too many times to mention the number; this year was as energetic, collaborative, engaged, and effective as I can ever recall. Our presence was first-class and meticulously organized, which made our interactions as robust as possible. It's a team effort, and we appreciate all the work that goes into this event. “ – Greg Koerner, Vice President of Digital Advertising Sales Our CES AdTech recap Supporting publishers and advertisers is top of mind for us. Many of our conversations focused on the technologies we deliver or collaborate with our partners to provide. Clean rooms and activation were two common themes throughout our discussions. Clean rooms Consumer privacy, regulatory requirements, and data deprecation are driving the AdTech industry to talk about and explore clean rooms. There’s a need to address data collection, storage, analysis, and sharing. Clean rooms are a potential solution that can standardize data and address interoperability issues. Activation In 2023, we predict that digital activation will increase. We continue to see increased demand for environments where alternative identifiers are being transacted (like demand side platforms and video). Social platforms will continue to experience volatility and advertisers will shift their focus to demand-side, video, and supply-side platforms. Download our 2023 Digital audience trends and predictions report to learn where you should activate your audiences in 2023. We can help plan your 2023 digital activation strategy. How we support clean rooms and activation Our Consumer Sync and Consumer View products support these areas and can help you understand people better–so you and your customers can connect with confidence. What is Consumer Sync? Consumer Sync, our consumer identity product, enables signal agnostic collaboration across marketers and technologies, bringing together digital devices, IDs, households, and attributes. Consumer Sync’s Resolution and Collaboration solutions can help you gain a better understanding of your consumers and make identities actionable in any environment. What is Consumer View? Consumer View, our data discovery product, offers marketers a robust, privacy-first understanding of their customers and prospects. Grounded in consumer identity, Consumer View provides the data foundation to engage consumers where, when, and how they want. Consumer View’s Audience and Attribution solutions provide expansive coverage so that you can fill in the gaps to better understand your prospects. Additionally, our collaborative efforts with strong partnerships across the clean room ecosystem and with our activation partners help our clients serve the best ads, at the best times, to the right audience. “CES is back and was a great way to kick off the new year! We were able to meet with a high volume of clients to eagerly talk about building new solutions for the TV space. We are excited to see where these conversations lead in the next few months.” – Ali Mack, Senior Director of TV Advertising Sales Let’s navigate what’s new in our industry, together We can help you connect with your consumers in innovative, impactful ways. Contact us to continue the conversation and learn more about our Consumer Sync and Consumer View products. We can help you take advantage of the opportunities on the horizon. Get in touch
2022 was a year of adjustment. Consumers adjusted to a post-pandemic world and returned to pre-pandemic shopping behaviors. Consumers adjusted their budgets as the price of goods skyrocketed, as a result of high inflation. To combat inflation, the U.S. Federal Reserve adjusted interest rates. This further restricted consumer buying power. The AdTech ecosystem also experienced adjustments. Google adjusted the date of cookie deprecation. Federal legislation forced technology companies to adjust their consumer privacy practices. Marketers and advertisers adjusted how they address interoperability issues by investing in clean room solutions. This year of adjustment makes it harder to predict where consumers will spend and how marketers should plan their digital audience strategies. What will 2023 bring to AdTech? Download our 2023 AdTech trends and predictions report to access our forecast to help you plan for 2023. Our report will answer: How has digital activation changed over the last four years? What are the top advertising platforms? Which digital audiences are advertisers buying? Do digital audience strategies vary by vertical? Our AdTech trends forecast In 2023, digital activation will increase. Digital audience activation continues to grow at a significant rate despite market shocks like the pandemic, inflation, and higher interest rates. Given the current economic uncertainty, we predict that marketers will look toward tried and true channels where they are confident they will have quality audiences, inventory, and be able to drive ROI. What will digital activation look like in 2023? Between 2018-2021, digital audience activation increased annually by 46%. Using projected 2022 results, between 2018-2022, it will increase annually by 34%. We anticipate continued growth in 2023. Top advertising platforms in 2023 2023 will see increased digital activation, but which platforms will advertisers use to serve their ads? Advertisers will shift their focus to demand-side, video, and supply-side platforms. Social media platforms will continue to experience volatility. Advertisers will place bigger bets on the combination of addressable and CTV. Our report will also reveal which platforms are creating a path toward a post-cookie future and where data-sharing relationships will become the strongest. The most popular advertiser audiences trending now in AdTech Which digital audiences are advertisers buying? Demographics Modeled Lifestyles Behavioral Custom Audiences Traditional targeting methods like Demographics and Modeled Lifestyles are the baseline of many marketing strategies. We predict that we will continue to see marketers activate against these data sets. Digital audience strategies by vertical Digital audience strategies vary by vertical. Download our report to uncover the digital audiences purchased by advertisers in the following industries: Financial Services Health Retail & CPG Technology & Communication Download our new 2025 Digital trends and predictions report Marketers, agencies, and platforms are facing new challenges as privacy regulations evolve, AI technology advances, and consumer behaviors shift. Our latest report highlights actionable strategies for navigating these changes and improving how you connect with audiences, measure impact, and deliver results. What you’ll learn Navigating signal loss: Explore the rise of alternative IDs and contextual targeting as privacy regulations and signal loss reshape data-driven advertising. Connected TV (CTV): Understand the growth of connected TV (CTV), the importance of frequency capping, and strategies for effective audience activation. Omnichannel campaigns: Learn how marketers are moving from channel-specific strategies to audience-led omnichannel campaigns that tell a more cohesive story. Retail media networks: Learn how retail media networks (RMNs) are capitalizing on enriched first-party data to learn more about their customers and reach them across on-site and off-site inventory. Curation: Examine how curation is transforming programmatic campaigns by combining audience, contextual, and supply chain signals to deliver premium inventory packages that maximize addressability, efficiency, and performance. Download now Get in touch
Viewers shift between streaming services, live TV, and on-demand content across multiple devices, making it harder to know exactly who sees your message. Instead of wondering if your ads are reaching the right viewers, it's important to have a clearer understanding of viewing behaviors so you can focus your efforts on the audiences that matter most to your campaign. Experian has collaborated with The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) to create new opportunities for marketers. By combining data from the ARF’s DASH (Device and Account Sharing) study with Experian Marketing Data, we’ve developed a new way for you to understand and reach modern TV viewers. Instead of estimating who might see your message, you gain a clearer view of viewing behavior and can align activation with the audiences that matter to your campaign. What is the DASH study? The DASH study, developed by the ARF together with the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) and seven industry sponsors, including Experian, provides a detailed picture of how American households consume TV and digital media. This research offers an unbiased and accurate view of media habits, measuring everything from device usage to streaming account sharing. When this viewership data is combined with Experian Marketing Data, it allows for the creation of unique audience segments. These segments are built on real-world media and device usage, providing a more accurate representation of how people watch, share, and engage with TV content. This combination of identity and connectivity helps marketers understand exactly how people engage with media, technology, and their favorite brands. “Television viewing behavior has undergone a massive transformation, making it challenging for advertisers to reach their target audience and optimize frequency. These audiences give advertisers invaluable tools for managing their campaigns in an increasingly fragmented environment.”Doug McLennan, Director of Product Management How do DASH audiences help? By using the DASH study, Experian developed TV audience segments that reflect how people truly interact with content. These audiences provide the insights you need to align your campaigns with actual media consumption habits, helping you reach viewers with more relevant messages. This approach moves beyond basic demographics. It allows you to connect with people based on specific behaviors, such as co-viewing, screen preferences, or household streaming habits. The result is a more focused and efficient advertising strategy that delivers better outcomes. “DASH has established itself as a reliable and unbiased calibration set, a “true North”, for media measurement. Our collaboration with Experian puts the power and precision of DASH in the hands of marketers and advertisers as well.” Paul Donato, Chief Research Officer Which audience segments help you target viewers more effectively? These audience segments make it possible to find specific types of viewers and align your marketing campaigns with their media usage. Whether you’re connecting with people who are receptive to ads, households that enjoy shows together, or individuals who are frequent streamers, you can approach campaigns with greater accuracy and confidence. We’re pleased to introduce these segments and continue our partnership with the ARF, creating new opportunities to help you build effective connections with your target audiences. Explore some of our key audience segments: Ad Acceptors: Viewers who are more open to watching advertisements. Ad Avoiders: People who actively try to skip or block ads. Co-Watchers: Households where multiple people view content together. Solo Watchers: Individuals who typically watch TV by themselves. Paid TV High Spenders: Households that subscribe to multiple paid TV or streaming services. Large Screen Viewers: People who primarily watch content on large television screens. Small Screen Viewers: Individuals who prefer watching on smaller devices like tablets or phones. How can I use these audiences? Experian’s DASH audiences are available in your demand-side platform (DSP) of choice, ready for activation across all offline and online channels. This easy access means you can build more effective campaigns without changing your existing workflow. Using these segments, you can manage your advertising with greater confidence. You gain the tools needed to navigate the fragmented media environment and ensure your campaigns are seen by the right people. This targeted approach helps you maximize the impact of your marketing efforts and achieve your goals. Strengthen your TV planning and activation with DASH audiences. Are you ready to connect with your audience in a more meaningful way? FAQs What is the DASH study? The DASH study, developed by ARF, provides an unbiased view of how American households consume TV and digital media. It measures device usage, streaming habits, and account sharing to create a detailed picture of media consumption. How does Experian help advertisers understand media habits? Experian combines its Marketing Data with insights from studies like DASH to create audience segments based on real-world behaviors. This allows advertisers to align their campaigns with how people actually consume content. What types of audiences can I target with these segments? Audience segments include Ad Acceptors, Co-Watchers, Solo Watchers, Paid TV High Spenders, and Large or Small Screen Viewers, enabling precise targeting based on viewing habits. Why is understanding viewing behavior important for advertisers? By focusing on actual media consumption habits, advertisers can deliver more relevant messages, reduce wasted impressions, and improve the overall effectiveness of their campaigns. Latest posts