Seasonal Marketing Tips – How to Market in the Off Season | Marketing 360
– So how should a business
that's a seasonal business plan for their marketing campaigns
throughout the year? Do they just market during
the season of their business or do they market in the off
season or do they do both? And I would say you need to do both. Just like if you're
training as an athlete, you train in the off season
more so than you do during the season, a lot of times. You continue training during both, but the way that you train changes, and that's the same way
with a small business, a seasonal business needs
to have a marketing campaign that runs all year, but
the way in which you market is gonna need a shift when it's off season and during the season. So let's talk about some of those tips about how you can market your
business during the season and during the off season coming up.
Tip one for marketing your
business in the off season is to really build your organic presence on Google search and Google
Maps for your business. So people search things
when it's the season and when the season comes,
you wanna be ranking on top so what you need to do
during the off season is really put a lot of
effort behind getting your business ranking at the top of Google for your best keywords on search, and also the best keywords for the maps.
People use Google search and Google Maps to find the local businesses
and so when the season starts to come, let's say it's landscaping, people will start to
search for those services that you provide, and you wanna be on top. Well, you don't just get on top overnight this isn't something you can
just sink your teeth into when the season comes
around, you'll be too late. You need to start working
on this in the off season, building content on your website, building monster pages, we call it which are huge landing pages for these keywords, getting more reviews on
your Google Maps listing so your maps listing ranks higher than so many other things in between there when it comes to SEO
and content marketing, this should be your focus
during the off season so that your business ranks very high for as many keywords as
possible that are gonna drive you business when the season comes around. Tip two during the off season is to build your presence on social media. This is really important
because you wanna be the brand that the customers think of first when the season comes around.
But they're not gonna think of you first if you don't start marketing
until the season starts, you're way too late, you need
to get out in front of this. So here's the thing when
somebody is using something like a landscaper, they're
thinking about this well before the spring comes,
because they know that the schedules are getting
busy for landscapers. So what's your business and what are those people thinking about? How do you get in front of them
on social media in advance? So when they start to think about things they're gonna need in the future, they see you and they're
thinking of you first. And that just comes down to social media and maybe doing some advertising, they're doing some organic
posting their to stay out in front of people, making
your brand aware to them. There's a great idea here you can leverage which is this the idea of reminders. This can be a great way
to build a huge list. For example, maybe you are a business that has a busy season coming up like a childcare business that
is gonna be real busy when school gets out,
because a lot of kids are gonna need childcare
when school gets out.
Well, you wanna start
putting reminders out there on social media for these parents saying, hey, save your spot now
classes are filling up, put your email in here, your name in here and get an alert when we're ready to start registering
people for these classes or for these daycare sessions,
those sorts of things. What type of business are you on? What are those sorts of alerts
that you can throw out there for people to help them actually remember to do this when the time comes? The thing is, is you're
building a huge list, a huge audience so that when
the season comes around, let's say it's lawn
care, and now it's time to start getting your lawn
cut, you could even have alerts and promotions on social
media for discounts for the early birds. So that could be Hey,
you need your lawn cut in the spring, springs come
in, put your name in here and get an early bird discount
so that when we're ready to start filling up the
schedule, you're on top and you get the discount.
What happens is you start
building a huge list here so when the season rolls around, your schedule is full and that's the key. Tip number three and
why you should continue to market during the off
season is to build an audience that you can use for
retargeting and advertising when the season comes around. The way that retargeting works is, as people see you on social media, or they go to your website,
they're added into a list, you don't necessarily have to
be advertising to this list it's just building an
audience of individuals that have seen your brand
or been to your website. The key here is is to have
a list as big as possible so that when the season comes around, you have this huge list
that you can now run ads to. Now that people all that
whole list of people in your audience list as
soon as the season hits, they're all of a sudden
seeing your ads everywhere it just feels like you're
the best company in town.
The beauty of retargeting
is is it's really cheap so if you build this huge list in advance as the seasons coming up,
when you start to advertise and turn your retargeting
ads on during the season, it's gonna be much less
expensive than you running ads to just a brand new list people that aren't in your retargeting list just running ads like a top
of google are other ways the cost per click there is really high if you're doing it that way, but if they've been to
your website before, or they've seen you
before to remarket to them is actually really cheap.
And so you wanna have the
biggest of a list as possible when the season hits so that instantly your ads are everywhere
and everybody goes to you instead of your competitor. And tip number four last
tip during the off season is to prepare for the season by building up your reputation. Building up your
reputation is so important because people are gonna
make decisions based on the number of reviews you
have in your overall rating. Well the off season is
a great time to pause and look at all the customers
that you've served during the busy season and follow up with them make sure that they're doing
well and capture reviews and the process of
capturing all these reviews when you get good reviews you
can also ask for referrals.
And in many cases a lot of these if your business that's
a recurring business so like a pest control
has seasonality to it where the same customer
base needs you again. So it's a good opportunity to
also get out in front of them and schedule them for the next season. The key is if you can do the
right type of marketing during the off season, you can actually fill your schedule for the season. Here's the beauty of that,
if you fill your schedule for the season, you don't have to do as much increased marketing
during the season. And here's the thing,
marketing during the season is much more expensive, because marketing is a competitive thing. A lot of it's a bidding mechanism between you and your competitors. So if everybody's rushing
to try to run their ads at the same time, it's
gonna push up the price. But if you don't need to
be the desperate business that's doing that, then
because your schedule are already full, you're
actually gonna have a better return on investment.
So I think that you will
ultimately see a better return on investment with your
marketing if you evenly spread it throughout the year and
stay consistent with it and keep your schedule full
in advance as opposed to not marketing in the off season and then waiting till the
season and then panicking and then spending way too
much to get the business that you're looking for.
And so these are just
some things to think about as a business owner
with a seasonal business and how you can be prepared for a winning season next season. So thanks for watching these tips, hopefully you enjoyed the video
and it gave you some ideas on how you can market your
business in the off season and prepare for a winning season. If you have additional
tips that you wanna leave in the comments, please do
like the video if you like it, share with your friends and follow us for more content like this down the road. Happy marketing.
