Most service businesses are seasonal to some degree, and most advertising accounts are managed as though they are not. A flat monthly budget across a year with a threefold swing in demand overpays in the trough and underfunds the peak, which is close to the opposite of what the business needs.
Planning around the season is not complicated. It requires knowing when your demand actually moves, which is a question about your own records rather than about the platform.
Find your real season, not the one you assume
Pull two years of enquiries by month and look at when they arrived, rather than when the work was delivered. Those are frequently different by several weeks, and the advertising should follow the enquiry curve. A business that installs in spring often receives its enquiries in late winter, and budget planned around installation months arrives too late.
Where you have search data, look at when interest in your terms rises rather than when your phone rang. Interest usually leads enquiries, which gives you the lead time to fund the campaign before the competition does.
Raise budget ahead of the peak
The instinct is to increase spend when the phone starts ringing, which means entering the auction at the moment competition and cost are highest, with an account that has to relearn at the new budget level. Raising a few weeks earlier gets the learning done while clicks are cheaper and puts you in position when demand arrives.
It also matters for the slower channels. Content and organic work take months, so anything intended to support a season needs to be published a quarter ahead rather than in the month itself.
Everybody raises budget in the same fortnight, which is exactly why that fortnight is expensive. The businesses doing well got there three weeks earlier and paid less for the same position.
Olivia Grant, Head of Paid Media, Media @ Marsons
Do not switch off in the trough
Pausing campaigns entirely during a quiet period looks like an obvious saving and carries a cost that does not appear on the invoice. Restarting means another learning period, historical performance data ages, and any position built in the market resets. For most accounts a reduced budget maintained through the trough costs less overall than a stop and a restart.
The trough is also the cheapest time to be visible, which suits anything with a long consideration period. Somebody researching a summer project in February is a cheap impression and a real customer later.
Use the quiet period for the work you cannot do when busy
- Rewrite the landing pages, which is impossible to schedule during a peak.
- Clear the negative keyword backlog and restructure anything untidy.
- Fix the tracking that has been slightly wrong since the last website change.
- Build and test the creative you will need when demand returns.
Accounts that improve year on year are usually the ones where the trough was used deliberately rather than treated as a period to survive.
Plan for the weather and the calendar
For some trades demand is driven by conditions rather than by the month: a cold snap, a storm, the first warm weekend. Those cannot be scheduled, and you can decide in advance what the response is, so raising budget is a decision made in an hour rather than a discussion held over three days while the demand passes.
Write the calendar down
A simple twelve-month plan with a budget figure per month, agreed in advance and reviewed quarterly, removes most of the month-to-month improvisation that costs money. It also makes the case for the peak spend before anyone is anxious about it, which is a considerably easier conversation than asking mid-season.
Our PPC hub covers what this looks like by sector, and the digital marketing hub covers sequencing the slower channels around the same calendar.
Want the plan built around your season?
Send us two years of enquiry data and we will map a budget calendar that raises spend before the peak rather than during it.
