Seasonal businesses tend to run marketing the way they run everything else: flat out during the season and switched off outside it. It is understandable, cash is tight in the quiet months, and it is the main reason the season starts slower than it should.
Seasonal business marketing works better when the quiet period is treated as preparation rather than as a gap. Most of what makes a season successful has to be in place before it begins.
Demand builds before it arrives
People start thinking about seasonal work well before they act. Somebody planning a summer extension is looking in February, and somebody who will need a heating engineer in November has already had a cold evening in September.
A business absent during that consideration window is not in the set being chosen from when the decision happens. Being present early is often cheaper too, because competitors have also switched off and the auction is thinner.
What to keep running
- Anything that captures people actively researching, which starts earlier than the buying does.
- Your listings and profiles, which cost nothing and look abandoned when nobody posts.
- Email to past customers, which is where the early bookings come from.
- Content and site work, since anything published now has time to be found before the season.
The last one is the strongest argument for out-of-season activity. Search visibility takes months to build, so work done in the quiet period is what pays during the busy one, and work started in the busy period arrives too late.
The businesses that have a good season are the ones that spent the quiet months preparing for it. The ones that switch everything off spend the first month of the season catching up.
Marcus Bennett, VP of Strategy, Media @ Marsons
What to genuinely pause
Broad awareness spend aimed at people who cannot act yet is reasonable to cut, as is anything promoting immediate availability when the work is months away.
The distinction is between reaching people who are researching and reaching people who are not thinking about it at all. The first is preparation; the second is spending to be forgotten.
Warn the bidding about your season
Automated bidding learns from recent behaviour, which means a predictable annual spike looks like an anomaly. A strategy that has spent three months learning from quiet-period data will underspend at exactly the moment it should lean in.
Seasonality adjustments exist for this and are widely unused. Setting one for a known period with an expected change in conversion rate means the strategy enters the season with the right expectation rather than spending the first fortnight discovering it.
Book early and say so
Where capacity is the constraint in season, an early-booking message out of season converts well and smooths the workload. It also gives you a reason to contact past customers that is genuinely useful to them rather than promotional.
Use the time for the work you never get to
The quiet period is when the site can be improved, photographs taken, case studies written, reviews chased, listings corrected and the follow-up sequence built. None of it happens in season because nobody has an hour.
Pick two or three things rather than a rebuild. A business that improves its service pages and collects a year of photographs in the off-season enters the season substantially better equipped than one that planned a new website and did not finish it.
Plan the ramp before it starts
Decide in advance when spend increases, by how much, and what triggers it. A business that reacts to the season starting has already lost several weeks, because the response takes time to have an effect.
Look at last year’s enquiry timing rather than last year’s revenue timing. Enquiries lead revenue by however long your sales cycle is, and that gap is what determines when the marketing should actually start. The PPC hub covers how the ramp is handled by sector.
Season about to start?
We will plan the run-up so demand is already building before your busy period begins.
