Faced with an abrupt decrease in pageviews, leads, and sales, any good business owner would immediately begin by identifying the cause and finding a fix, right? “Of course they would,” you say, “or they wouldn’t own a business for very long!”
But there’s one common, recurring issue affecting thousands of businesses every year, and many of them consider it beyond treatment. I’m talking about the slow season, a period of time each year during which interest in your business naturally lulls.
For a ski resort, the summertime is a dead period, and many have adapted by building a waterpark or marketing to mountain bikers during the warmer months. But for online businesses, it can be a bit more difficult to figure out how to keep customers coming to the virtual storefront.
Here are a few tips that could help you stay productive and profitable during your business’s slow season.
1. Create enticing promotions
Leverage your blog or social media followers to get the word out about great deals your company is having or build buzz for an upcoming offering to keep customers interested and engaged.
2. Generate content
Beyond simply advertising a product, you can build your business’s brand with a how-to guide, an informative video, or a newsletter about the latest news in your industry. Promote your business as an authority. By providing this useful info, you remind your viewers what you do and keep your company’s name at the front of their mind.
3. Use the time to give your website a facelift
A slow season is the perfect time to refresh an outdated website or work on new photographs, visuals, and content. Don’t forget to spend some time and energy on the backend as well: update your SEO by replacing meta descriptions and tags that don’t utilize good keywords.
4. Rethink your advertising
For an ice cream shop, a winter slowdown might be unavoidable, but for you it might not be. Explore social media advertising, or to simplify customer outreach, utilize an email marketing program like MailChimp or Constant Contact (many have free trials). Take a look at all that data you gathered during the busy season and plan a new online marketing approach. Then implement it before business picks up again!
A slow season can be a discouraging time for a business owner, and it may feel like the natural flow of traffic is out of your hands. Try to focus on what you can change (your deals, content, website, and advertising) rather than what you can’t. When business picks up again, you might find that the work you did during the slow-down has paid off.
