Weather marketing, commonly known as ‘weather based marketing’ or ‘weather triggered marketing’, is a powerful form of marketing automation which utilizes real-time weather data to trigger ads and personalize marketing messages based on your audience’s local weather.

In other words, you can serve ads for raincoats when it’s rainy, windbreakers when it’s windy, thermals when it’s snowy and breathable vests when it’s hot.

With weather marketing, you can rotate ad creatives to match the viewer’s weather, inject dynamic, localized weather information into the ad itself, and modify campaign spend levels and regional bidding decisions based on local weather conditions.

Tools like WeatherAds can be used to deploy weather triggered marketing campaigns quickly, easily and cheaply across search, display, shopping and social.

What's Weather Got To Do With Marketing?

The weather is a universal driver of consumer purchase behaviour, mood and receptiveness to marketing messages. It has a direct effect on sales for around 30% of all products and services and is the 2nd biggest influence on consumer behaviour behind the state of the economy.

Marketers know that weather has a tremendous bearing on what actions consumers take; where they go and how they travel, what food they eat, what clothes they wear, what products and services they buy and even how they feel on an hour-by-hour basis.

Just ask yourself, what did you have for lunch today - was it a salad or a hot soup?  How did you travel to work this morning - did you walk or did you get a cab? What clothes did you wear when you left the house? And what was your mood like – was it bright, or was it gloomy? Many of your everyday decisions are subtly shaped by the elements.

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The impact of weather on consumer demand (for marketers, read conversions) is so ubiquitous, and the range of weather dependant verticals so vast, that many businesses may not even realise the true extent to which their sales are driven by weather. Here is an example of some weather sensitive industries that can yield massive returns from running weather based marketing campaigns.

How Do I Create A Weather Triggered Marketing Campaign?

Weather marketing platforms such as WeatherAds enable advertisers to easily apply weather based automation to their search, display, social and shopping campaigns. In less than 5 minutes you can turn an ordinary AdWords, Facebook or Instagram campaign into a weather responsive one – triggering your ads or social media posts to activate before, during or after localized weather events.

WeatherAds empowers weather sensitive brands to engage their most sales-ready customers, with weather- relevant ads or marketing messages that move them to action.

For example, a snow-clearing business can target ads to audiences who are located in areas where there has been a heavy dump of snow recently.

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A soft drinks company can target audiences who are experiencing temperatures above 95F and high humidity levels and display ads for bottled water to them.

Cafes can promote hot coffee on a cold day and iced smoothies on a warm day, and taxi or food delivery services can ramp up their advertising spend when the weather is terrible since that is when they hit peak demand.  

The opportunities that exist around weather triggered marketing are absolutely vast, with tools like WeatherAds offering marketers an intuitive and easy method of cashing in on the weather.  

Should I Be Using Weather Triggers In My Marketing Campaigns?

Pivoting your marketing messages around weather moments - whether that be through paid search ads, banner ads, email marketing blasts, SMS and push notifications, or social media posts – creates more targeted, more personalized and more impactful ads. That’s why weather triggered marketing campaigns have been proven to yield significantly higher engagement and conversions for a huge cross-section of industry verticals – you can see numerous case studies further down the page, as well as here and here.

However, many advertisers aren’t taking advantage of weather based opportunities, and fewer still are doing it in an automated way. The result is less relevant messaging, missed sales opportunities, and wasted marketing spend.

This is great news for those marketers that are utilizing software like WeatherAds to create marketing campaigns that dynamically respond to changes in the weather in real time. As a marketer, you can gain a massive competitive advantage by capitalizing on weather-driven demand, out-ranking and outperforming your competitors on paid search, display and social, during those critical weather moments.

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Examples Of Weather Based Marketing Campaigns

Clothing brands

A clothing brand that sells outdoor clothing can display ads for waterproof jackets when it’s forecast to rain, and ads for hiking gear when the forecast looks good for the coming weekend. Timberland achieved excellent results from running personalized weather triggered emails:

Restaurants

More than 90% of restaurant operators indicate that changes in local weather affect their sales and footfall. Restaurants can create marketing messages around different weather events – Spin! Pizza introduced ‘crummy weather days’ discount coupons through social media and achieved a 20% increase in foot traffic during wintery weather, which then also spilled over into good weather days.

Travel Services

Travel services such as holiday booking sites typically see a spike in sales for sunny destinations during periods of inclement local weather. They can trigger ads during cold, wet, overcast, or snowy weather advertising last minute flights to ‘sun and sea’ resorts.

Home & Garden

Homeware, hardware and garden stores can use weather triggered marketing to their advantage since a vast portion of their stock is weather dependant. Home furniture giant Ikea saw a huge spike in conversions and 24% overall improved ROI by advertising certain interior products during rainy weather, whilst B&Q have enjoyed success with weather based marketing strategy that aligned selected products to various weather conditions.

Insurance Providers

in 2014 hail alone caused $2.3 billion in damage in the US, whilst 52% people reported they would take action if notified of an impending weather threat. Insurance companies can trigger timely messages that help customers protect their property or vehicles from severe weather events, thus avoiding claims and saving millions of dollars in cover. TWC reports that Insurers advertising saw a 72% lift in advertising interaction rate compared to industry benchmarks when using weather triggers.

Pharmaceuticals

Many common ailments are potentiated by weather – such as common colds and flu, arthritis, hay fever, sunburn, chapped lips and so on.

OTC pharma brands can capitalize on weather driven demand to show ads for cold and flu remedies in areas where the temperature dips below 30F, sun cream in places where the UV is high, hay fever medication in areas with high pollen count, and chapstick where it is cold and windy.

Vicks VapoRub more than doubled purchase intent (2.3 X) whilst reducing CPM by 30% with their weather triggered advertising campaign on Facebook.

Automotive

You would be wrong to think that only low-ticket impulse buys are weather-driven. High-value purchases such as cars and houses are also influenced by weather. Brand awareness campaigns perform just as well with weather triggered advertising as direct response. Jeep’s weather-responsive ad unit performed an amazing 600 percent above the standard click-through rate of a mobile 320x50 banner ad.

Pour Conclure

The old saying ‘there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing’, is equally true for marketing campaigns. When companies blame ‘bad weather’ for a slump in profits in their quarterly reviews, they should instead be blaming bad marketing. By leveraging weather adaptive campaigns, businesses can turn any type of weather into profitable weather. Try WeatherAds free today and make your campaigns weather responsive in under 5 minutes.

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