Every business has its peak seasons throughout the year when its products or services are more popular than usual; naturally this leads to quieter months where business doesn’t boom quite so much.
For the majority of businesses, except those that cater specifically to the summer holidays, summer can be a slow season. And while many businesses can benefit from a surge in spending over the Christmas months, others may experience a lull as money is carefully allocated in preparation of the festive period, or spent elsewhere.
Navigating seasonal fluctuations and allowing your company to remain profitable during off-seasons can be a challenge. The key to doing so successfully involves knowing your business and its processes well; understanding your customers and the factors that cause them to reduce spending at certain times of the year; and developing smart practices that will help you to sustain a season-proof business. A good place to start is with your website.
Sophisticated tools like Google Analytics enable business owners to measure engagement in a way that is not possible in a physical environment. Google Analytics can provide you with a clearer picture of seasonal engagement by showing fluctuations in site visits and conversions over the course of the entire year. This data can then be compared to that of previous years in order to identify annualpatterns.
If you discover any slopes in your volume of visitors or conversions that appear to be reoccurring on a seasonal basis, maybe it’s time to start thinking of ways to encourage engagement during those off-seasons.
Get started by doing some research into local events that are due to take place throughout the year, and think about the ways you could incorporate them into your marketing strategy. You could even use larger, global events like the Olympics to your advantage by linking the theme to one of your promotions. It’s a good idea to plan this out at the beginning of the year to give yourself enough time to get prepared, and set the wheels turning on your content strategy.
The next step is getting this in front of your customers. An important part of this is having a website that can be easily updated whenever need be. You should be able to feature (and update) seasonal offers on your homepage, and you may also want to create dedicated service pages optimised with content and keywords targeted to that specific event or occasion. These pages need to be published a few months in advance to ensure they get indexed by Google and start ranking for any seasonal keywords that you use. If you run a blog on your website, you should also plan seasonal posts into your schedule, using the keywords that you expect to generate the most traffic.
So that you can make these updates yourself (instead of paying a fee to your web company each time you have a new seasonal feature to upload), think about investing in a CMS (content management system) that allows you to do so. MA Design, Cheltenham web designers, suggest opting for an open-source CMS system like DNN or WordPress; they generally receive more updates, come with thousands of additional plug-ins and design/layout options, and are known for being extremely proactive when it comes to site security.