Spring 2023 is already upon us!

For seasonal businesses like tax specialists, landscapers, deck/patio builders, HVAC, paving, and more it’s time to start ramping up.

We’ve worked with countless businesses that experience seasonal impact. Between hiring, fluctuations in lead flow, and managing the workforce-it can all be overwhelming.

We do our best to make the changes in season less stressful and more predictable for business owners by providing marketing guidance and making strategic adjustments online.

Let’s dive into some seasonal marketing strategies with examples!

Strategies for Maximizing the Off-Season

Ahead of the busy season, a lot can be going on to get prepared. You might be hiring, buying new equipment, restocking materials, etc.

To a business owner that sounds like shelling out the expenses and relying on future business to make up for it. Something that can keep you up at night!

Our off-season strategies can help you have a better expectation of what is to come, and the accuracy of that can improve every year that you work with us, thanks to data.

Hiring:

We’ve all heard or experienced the struggle for businesses to find talent over the last few years. If you need to hire we can do a few things.

First and foremost we can help put job listings on your website, get them on Google Jobs, and even setup an application form or resume/document uploader for applicants. We do not manage Indeed accounts, but we can provide some guidance there as well.

Once you’ve acquired talent, now it’s time to keep them busy.

Leveraging Existing Client Base with Email Marketing

The first way you might be able to get your new workforce working is to leverage your existing client base and promote any off-season products and services you may have. This could be maintenance/tune-up, getting folks on a maintenance plan, adding or enhancing existing products, letting them know about a potential upgrade, etc.

To do this we can use email marketing, assuming your business has gathered emails over the years. If you haven’t, we recommend starting as soon as possible. Alternatively, you can call previous customers or send them something in the mail.

If clients are on a recurring plan-you can also offer a discount for early payment to generate more cash flow.

We can set up email marketing campaigns to get prospective customers thinking about your business. Here are some examples.

Raising Awareness and Head Start on Leads/Revenue:

Ideally, we want to keep costs down in the off-season. Display Ads are a great option at $30-$60/month in ad spend. They can help raise awareness and are pushed out all over the internet.

If there is extra room in the budget-we can consider some search text ads on very specific search phrases we have high confidence in for ROI (based on research or historic data).

SEO

The last item is to prepare your website to rank well during the busy season.

Adding and updating content proactively, making data-based improvements can help your website appear more often in non-paid search rankings.

Ranking well alone can drive leads to your business. Pair that with digital ads and email marketing-you can be certain that prospective customers are going to see or be aware of your business when they need your products or services.

You can see some examples of ranking/traffic growth on our client results page.

Strategies for Amplifying In-Season

In-season, there’s a good chance you’ll be focusing on your business and too busy for much extra.

You can count on us to manage your online presence, drive leads, and let you know if anything important comes up.

Driving Leads with Digital Ads

Unfortunately for many business types ads are everywhere. Ads in search, display ads across the internet, ads on listing/directory sites. They can be unavoidable (see below-3 ad types at the top of the search results).

Businesses with less competition may be able to avoid running ads and some businesses can generate enough leads without them, but if you’re looking to grow and have a more reliable stream of leads, you’ll likely need ads. We do our very best to ensure that you’re generating significantly more than you’re spending. We always monitor closely, and are not afraid to let you know if ads simply are not working, or the budget requirement is too high.

There are all kinds of digital ads: Google (Search, Display, YouTube, Google Guaranteed), Bing, Yelp, Meta (Facebook), Instagram and more. You can target broadly, or narrow down with demographics, job titles, interests, and so much more. Depending on your business type, some make more sense than others. We can guide you to running the right ads, and manage them effectively.

Communication

A simple, but necessary part of the overall strategy.

As we said before, we’ll let you know if anything important comes up. Along with this, we may periodically check in just to make sure what we’re seeing on our end aligns with the business. If the leads are coming in too fast, we might want to lower the budget. If you’re booked out a couple of months in advance, we can put a banner on the website. Etc.

Keeping in communication will help us ensure we’re doing the best job we possibly can for you and your business.

Steady transition to off-season

As the off-season approaches, we can transition back into some of those off-season strategies.

It might make sense to completely turn ads off, gather an overview of data, reset goals, etc.

We always leverage what happened historically to make educated decisions going forward, making the future better and better for your business.

Helping seasonal businesses manage fluctuations, and grow

We’d love to discuss your goals around the seasonality of your business and what we can do to help you reach them.

Schedule a call with us so we can get a better understanding, and we’ll put together a free quote for you.
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