It is inevitable every year that eventually winter is coming. Many businesses will slow down their marketing while getting ready for End-of-the-Year close-out sales or to prepare tax returns. This is fairly normal as many customers stay home where it is warm and hang on to their money.
It is also pretty standard for many businesses to slow down their marketing campaigns instead of taking advantage of the opportunities presented. There is less competition during this lull in the business cycle and it is a great time for forward planning to drive increased sales when spring and summer hit. Ignoring your marketing campaign during the wintertime could leave your business out in the cold.
Businesses make several mistakes when it comes to winter marketing. They get distracted by the latest fads or rumors and miss the opportunity to position themselves for the selling season that is coming. Here are a few things to avoid during the winter.
Keyword Stuffing
“Bob’s cheap New York Computer technician is the best cheap New York Computer technician for all your computer needs. Contact a cheap New York Computer technician before it’s too late.” Those lines are a good (or maybe bad) example of keyword stuffing, something you definitely want to avoid. Trying to enhance your site’s ranking by “keyword stuffing” is basically a waste of time.
This SEO spamming technique has proven to be ineffective and a waste of time and amounts to “search engine manipulation” and most search engines find and flag it as spam. Furthermore, end users hate spam giving the search engines financial motivation to fight it. You will get more bang for your buck by using a first-rate inbound link to entice longer visits from target audiences if your website content persuasive, interesting, and f value.
Learn Your Buyers
Use this “downtime” to learn the personalities of your target buyers. From there you can develop marketing strategies to really grab their attention. If you don’t put in the time and effort required to really get to know your ideal audience, then you basically know nothing and will have a strategy that is shooting in the dark.
Track your marketing campaigns, determine baseline metrics, and find out what works and what doesn’t. Also, learn why some campaigns work and some don’t so you can your campaigns accordingly.
Nurture Leads
Now is a great time to nurture your leads. It is critical you develop a relationship with buyers at all stages of the sales funnel, to the end of the buyer’s journey, a sale. If this is not an integral part of your campaign you are probably missing out on a substantial number of potential customers who need just a little nudge to get them to make a purchase.
Marketing is a very competitive business and you can’t afford to lose out because you are using out-of-date strategies or opportunities presented by the slow winter sales cycle. Allocating resources without a clear strategy is fruitless and wasteful. Set your goals, get to know your ideal clients, tweak your campaigns if they don’t measure up and above all remember your target audience consists of human beings not search engines.