why year-round marketing matters (even for seasonal businesses)

The Myth of ‘Seasonal’ Marketing

We are approaching a slow season for many businesses. Seasonal businesses in tourism, hospitality, retail, real estate, and professional services have either closed or are slowing down over the winter months. Many year-round businesses will experience a post-holiday lull in just a few weeks. Even though the buzz quiets down, this is not a time to stop marketing! In fact, this is a time to strengthen brand awareness, continue to build customer relationships, test new marketing strategies, and overall keep momentum. 

Businesses in tourism-centric locations with a large influx of population during the summer months, like Nantucket and Cape Cod, see this lull each year, just after the busy season. When the spring rolls around, there’s a dash to pick back up on marketing ahead of the flood of summer visitors. Continuing marketing efforts year-round can make a big impact in the long run. Learn why and what you can do in the slow months to ensure your busy months are even more impactful.  

The Cost of Going Dark During the Off-season

Many marketing tactics are what we call a marathon, not a sprint. Going dark after your peak season can have consequences. 

• Loss of brand recall and visibility. Consistent posting, outreach to clients through email or SMS, paid advertising, and more can ensure that you’re staying top of mind to existing and potential customers. 

• Decline in social engagement. Social media platforms utilize algorithms that boost the content of users who are active and consistently posting. Pausing social media activity can cause your posts to get lost in the algorithm, resulting in less engagement over time. 

• Decreased SEO rankings. Search engines are constantly crawling websites to ensure they are up to date in terms of accuracy, credibility, and relevance. Keeping up through consistent SEO updates and blogging can help your business stay at the top of the search results. 

• Reduced email list health and customer loyalty. Finding the sweet spot for your email marketing is crucial to prevent emails from becoming spam, but it’s equally important to find the sweet spot on the other end of the spectrum. Through email marketing, you can stay top of mind with your contacts while also keeping your loyal customers…loyal. 

Marketing isn’t a one-season effort, but a long-term growth system. Keeping up with your marketing can keep your accounts growing, your followers engaged, and customers coming back.

Instead of Going Dark, Do This

1. Strengthen Your Brand

• Refresh visuals and photography. These small changes can make a big difference across all marketing efforts. Creating high-quality and consistent visuals emulates a high-quality and consistent look and feel on your social media, website, ads, emails, and more. 

• Refine your messaging. Impactful and consistent copy across channels creates clarity for your audience, leading them down a clear path to pay for your products and/or services. 

• Use this time to align your brand identity with upcoming campaigns. Prepare for upcoming campaigns by planning how your values, look, and feel align with campaigns and campaign timelines. Find out what makes you stand out among competitors ahead of your campaign launch.

2. Nurture Your Existing Audience

• Use email to keep in touch with existing customers. Offer special deals for past clients and customers to keep them coming back while there’s a lull in customer growth. Make sure they know they’re valued. 

• Create a “drip campaign”. Drip campaigns are a series of automated, scheduled emails designed to nurture specific audiences and stay top of mind continuously.

• Share behind-the-scenes stories, events, or new products/services in development. Build buzz for the upcoming season!

3. Test and Learn

• Take time to test what works best with your audience! New ad creatives, different messaging, or A/B test landing pages.

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Smart Marketing Strategies for the Slow Season

• SEO + Blogging: Keep optimizing! Post updates, encourage reviews, and publish blogs that are valuable and relevant to your audience.

• Social Media: Focus on storytelling, user-generated content, and audience engagement.

• Email: Launch retention campaigns (exclusive discounts, pre-booking offers, gift card sales).

• Paid Ads: Test what performs best, and also retarget past visitors and maintain brand visibility at a lower cost.

If continuing your marketing efforts at full speed seems daunting, focus on the things that are the most important to your business. The key takeaway is to stay relevant and present online in whatever ways are realistic to your brand. If you’re interested in learning more or designing an off-season strategy to suit your needs, reach out to us!