Seasonal Marketing Calendar: Planning Your Farm's Entire Year

Most farm seasons live or die in the six weeks before they open. By the time guests are buying pumpkin patch tickets in October, the work that actually fills the season already happened back in July. The farms we see grow 40 to 50% in a single year usually share one habit: they treat marketing as a year long calendar, not a fall sprint.

Here’s the framework we build with every partner farm.

Start with your peak weekends, not your services

Every farm has three to five weekends that decide the season. For a pumpkin patch, that’s usually the two weekends before Halloween. For a sunflower festival, it’s the peak bloom window. For a Christmas tree farm, it’s the two weekends after Thanksgiving.

Mark those weekends first. Everything else in your calendar exists to fill them, support them, or extend them.

This sounds obvious. It isn’t. Most farms plan their marketing the other direction, scheduling email blasts and ad pushes around when staff has time. The result: campaigns run when capacity is available, not when revenue opportunity is highest.

The 12 month framework

January and February: Review last season’s numbers. What was the highest revenue day? What was the highest margin day? What was the cheapest customer to acquire? You’re not promoting anything yet. You’re learning what worked.

March: Start your email list reactivation. Send a “what we’re planning this year” email to last year’s full guest list. You’ll see a small jump in engagement and a few replies. Both matter. The replies tell you what families are asking about. The opens tell you which families are still listening.

April and May: Build out the year’s TicketSpice changes. New ticket types. Updated bundles. Calendar coloring for any new events. This is the right time to do platform work because no one is buying tickets yet, so mistakes are cheap.

June: Soft launch. Tease the season on social media. Open early bird tickets to your email list only. You’re not trying to fill weekends yet. You’re trying to convert your most loyal families into the first buyers, which gives you proof the platform works.

July and August: Pre season heat up. Start running ads to families who visited last year. Build retargeting audiences from website visitors. Send the “save these dates” email. Get on local family blogs and influencer feeds. The goal is awareness, not direct ticket sales.

September: Sell early. By the second week of September, every peak weekend should be available for purchase. Push pre sale heavily. Families who buy in September show up. They’ve made a commitment.

October: Manage capacity. The work shifts from selling tickets to managing the experience. Time slot adjustments. Capacity messaging. Day of guest communications. Reviews requests. Your ads are now defensive, protecting share of voice against competing fall events.

November and December: For pumpkin patches, this is wind down. For Christmas tree farms, this is your October. For everyone, December is when you ask for reviews, send thank you emails to your highest spenders, and gently reactivate first time guests with a “we’d love to have you back next year” sequence.

What changes when you actually have a calendar

Three things, every time:

1. You stop running last minute discounts. Most “early bird sold out, buy now” campaigns are panic moves. With a calendar, you don’t panic.

2. Your email frequency stops feeling random. Families know when to expect updates. Open rates climb. Unsubscribes drop.

3. Your ad spend gets cheaper. Cold acquisition at the last minute is expensive. Acquisition spread across June through September is dramatically cheaper, especially when targeting families who’ve already visited.

Two free templates we share with every partner farm

The first is a one page weekend grid. Top row is your weekends. Rows below are: ticket goal, email sends, social posts, ad budget, and notes. One spreadsheet. The whole season visible at a glance.

The second is a campaign trigger sheet. Every Monday, you check what’s triggered by the previous week’s sales: should we extend the ad budget on this weekend, pull back on that one, add capacity, or push a flash sale.

Neither template is the magic. The magic is in deciding the season is too important to wing.

What this looks like for our partner farms

We build the calendar with you in January. We run the campaigns from June through November. You get a Sunday email every week from September on, with the actual revenue numbers, which campaigns drove what, and what we’re shifting for the coming weekend.

It works because every week is connected to the calendar, and the calendar was decided when there was time to think.