In my last blog, I discussed various seasonal influences and trends that can affect demand for products and services. The conclusion was that while this can be complicated, some trends do appear to be consistent. In that piece, I mentioned the importance of businesses being educated and prepared for these trends, which require further discussion.
By predicting what will happen with demand for your business before it occurs, you can enhance your preparedness and ensure that your marketing efforts are backed by a strategy that aligns with the upcoming demand climate.
Although increasing marketing budgets during peaks of seasonal demand is typically a good strategy, this does not necessarily mean that reducing budgets during seasonal downturns is the best idea.
Maintain Brand Awareness
By withdrawing from marketing during lull periods, you run the risk of reducing your brand's visibility. Building recognisability for your brand is essential and can cultivate trust with your customers. Lead and purchase cycles may be extended, with project managers conducting research and preparing before getting in touch. Ensuring that you remain visible during this research period can be crucial.
Psychology suggests that we tend to prefer and trust familiarity. We like what we know. This is one of the reasons we struggle to force ourselves to switch away from Heinz beans to shop-brand beans. So, when a customer decides to get in touch or make a purchase, you want them to already recognise your brand and offerings.
This familiarity may have a positive impact on performance during peak periods as competition intensifies and it becomes more difficult to stand out in crowded advertising spaces. By withdrawing your marketing efforts and reducing your brand visibility, you risk handing over precious market share to competitors.
Potential Cost-Efficiency
With some adopting the mindset of pulling back marketing budgets during off-peak periods, you may sometimes find less competition in paid ad auction spaces. In these advertising spaces, this can lead to lower cost-per-clicks (CPCs), potentially resulting in increased visibility, as it may be cheaper to acquire traffic to your site through ads.
Although this is a possibility, participants in the ad auctions are generally competing for lower levels of traffic during these lull periods and may increase their CPC bids to stand out against competitors. This could drive up bids, meaning things can go either way. Either way, as previously mentioned, maintaining brand visibility consistency is important.
SEO Efforts
With SEO (search engine optimisation) being a long-term digital marketing technique, it takes time for SEO efforts to come to fruition, as Google’s clever spiders need time to scan your website's content and determine your rankings. With this in mind, it is often best not to let cobwebs build up on your site during seasonal troughs by pausing SEO efforts. By continuing your efforts during off-peak times, you can gear your website up for when those searches come rolling back in and continue to build your authority on the results page.
In addition, competitors may withdraw their efforts - this presents an opportunity for you to get ahead in the rankings. This would likely make it trickier for them to catch up when demand picks back up.
Do Your Research & Get Prepared
Diving into your industry’s and business’s historical data in relation to trends can help you develop marketing plans and strategies for seasonal changes. By equipping yourself with the ammunition of knowledge, when a seasonal downturn hits and those phones stop ringing or sales on your website decrease, you can approach these periods with less anxiety and a greater sense of confidence, knowing that you have control over the situation. You were expecting it, and you have a plan in place ready to tackle it. This will likely help prevent hasty decisions that could have a detrimental impact on your business, such as pulling the plug on marketing efforts.
As a paid marketing expert and a bit of a nerd, there is little that excites me more (apart from Ikea’s meatballs) than having a bank of data to inform the implementation of new strategies, especially when it comes to solving pain points for my accounts and clients. Reviewing the historical performance of your marketing can be beneficial. It’s worth asking your team: What worked last year? What didn’t work so well? And how can we leverage these findings in this year's strategy?
Time For Experimentation
In the world of digital marketing, things rarely remain static - down periods offer the perfect opportunity for experimentation with creative and new strategies. Whether that involves split testing website changes or seeing what happens if you bid on that pesky competitor's brand name in the Google Ads auctions, the way I see it, all data is good data; it provides us with opportunities to learn. My saying is that as long as you’re learning, you are also growing. With experimentation, you are effectively ensuring that your marketing efforts - and therefore your business - are growing too. Down periods due to seasonality are great for this testing. You can apply your learnings to fine-tune your marketing efforts and potentially see stronger results as you head into peak seasons.
Pulling the plug on your marketing efforts when leads or sales dry up might seem like the most cost-effective solution for businesses. However, I would argue that this time is crucial for gathering data, testing new strategies, and essentially optimising the arsenal you have when you approach peak periods. You might not initially reap the rewards of your efforts, which can understandably cause concern, but these efforts can set you up for success and growth further down the road.
