Off-Season Growth
For many businesses, demand rises and falls with the seasons. Whether you’re a landscaper, roofer, paving contractor, lawn care provider, or power washing company, slower months can impact revenue. The off-season is the perfect time to strengthen your marketing, generate new leads, and prepare for busier months. Here are practical strategies to keep your business visible, attract customers, and support steady growth year-round.
- By Mike Purvis Co-founder of NH Strategic Marketing
- December 22, 2021
- August 10, 2026
How To Market a Seasonal Business: The Short Version
To market your seasonal business, treat the off-season as a second selling season instead of a break.
- Update your website and product or service pages.
- Publish content your customers already ask about.
- Show up when people ask AI tools who to hire.
- Collect reviews while the work is still fresh.
- Strengthen your Google Maps and local search rankings.
- Stay in front of past customers by email and keep a light ad budget running.
Book a call with a member of our team today to talk more about how you keep your business showing up prominently online during your off-season.
Why Your Off-Season Marketing Strategy Matters
One option you always have is to take the off-season completely off and go sip Mai Thais on the beach in some tropical location. Nothing wrong with that IF you make enough money in your busy season. Even if that’s your goal, it’s still a great idea to take some action in the off-season to set your business up for success once the busy season returns. Here are a couple of reasons why it’s a good idea:
Stay Top of Mind With Your Prospects and Customers
The last thing you want is for your ideal prospects and customers to forget your business exists by the time they need the services you offer. Doing some proactive marketing in the off-season can help keep your business top of mind so that when they are ready to buy they remember your business exists and reach out to you for help.
Gain an Edge Over Your Competitors
Business is competitive, and you’re likely not the only one in your service area that does what you do. To be competitive, taking some action in the off-season can help you gain a real competitive advantage that sets you up nicely when the busy season arrives again.
Protect the Search Rankings You Worked Hard to Earn
Search engines and AI tools both pay attention to how current a website looks. A site that sits untouched for months tends to lose ground to competitors who keep publishing and updating pages, even in a slow season. Off-season work protects the search rankings you earned during the busy months, rather than handing them to someone else by default.
Once you know how to market a seasonal business the right way, the off-season stops feeling like a slow, wasted stretch on the calendar. Here are twelve specific digital marketing strategies you can work on during the slow season.
12 Strategies To Market Your Business During The Slow Season
Time for some action. To be successful in business, you have to have a good plan and then execute on that plan. Below is a list of some actionable strategies you can and should take in the off-season to set you and your team up for success.
1. Update Your Website
Your website is the “home base” for your business and should work as a 24/7, 365-day virtual salesperson for the services you offer. And it’s important that you keep it up to date. Here are some activities you should consider completing in the off-season to make sure your website is up to par:
Audit Your Own Website
First and foremost, you should take some time to walk through every page of your website and make sure it accurately reflects who you are, what you do, and why customers should choose your business over a competitor. Take some notes as you comb through your site and make a list of updates you need to make.
Audit Your Competitors' Sites
Another task worth doing is studying your competitors’ websites, and do not stop at local competitors. Businesses doing what you do in other states often try things worth borrowing (in a completely legal way, of course). We put together a full walkthrough on how to ethically research your competitors if you want a repeatable process instead of guessing where to start. Come up with a list of ideas from looking at those competitor sites and do some updates to your own site.
Audit Your Site's SEO
SEO is what gets your website on the front page of Google when someone searches for a service you offer.
There are a few important factors that affect the SEO of your site.
- How the site is set up technically.
- The quality of the content on the page.
- The backlinks pointing to your site from other high-authority websites.
- The structure of your website and internal linking
You will want an SEO expert to look under the hood and tell you where your website stands today, and that happens to be right in our wheelhouse. Our SEO services cover exactly this.
First impressions happen fast online. We break down the data behind that in Is Your Current Site Holding You Back?, and it is a good gut check before you start this audit.
Update the Copyright Date
This is a small, simple, and yet often overlooked thing we see all the time with small business websites. If the current year is 2026 and the copyright date in your footer still reads 2019, that is a bad look for you. It is the digital version of a broken window on a storefront. An outdated footer can deter potential customers from wanting to work with you if your site looks outdated. It’s a simple 1 minute fix that you should take action on.
We recently did a webinar event for “5 Reasons You’re Not Getting More Business From Your Website.” For a limited time we’re allowing people who missed it to watch the replay by clicking the button below.
2. Create Content That Helps You Rank For More Keywords
In addition to the updates above, building out some quality content on your website can be a great way to improve your rankings in the search engines and attract more customers your way year-round. Here are some specific recommendations on how to beef up your website content.
Update the Content On The Service Pages
This is a very important recommendation. When we look at a seasonal business website, many times we find pretty “thin content” published on the service pages. That is a mistake. If you want to improve your rankings on Google, you need more and high-quality content on your services pages, not less. Go through the service pages on your site one by one and add real, written content to them. How can you say more about your process for that specific service? What makes your approach different from the next company’s? Can you add testimonials to the page? Can you add FAQs? Speaking of FAQs…
Add FAQs To Your Pages
Frequently asked questions are a strong addition to any website. During your season, you answer the same handful of questions from prospects and customers, over and over. You know the answers by heart, but you likely don’t have those same questions and answers posted on your website. We encourage you to think and write down the questions you answer all the time and post them, along with clear, well-written answers, on your service pages. This helps you rank for more keywords, and it helps prospective customers choose you over the business that never bothered to answer the question at all.
Add Blog Posts
When we see most seasonal businesses that have a blog, they typically do a terrible job with their blogging. If you’re going to blog you must have a strategy in place, target the right keywords, and write quality content. Short little blog posts with no value will never get you traffic to your website. Here’s how to do it the right way….
Create valuable content for anything your prospective customers ask about on a regular basis. So, if you’re a landscaper and your customers typically ask what type of fruit tree does best in your area, write an article about it. Your goal should be to write the best piece of content on the Internet about the topic.
3. Show Up When People Ask AI Tools Who To Hire for The Job
A growing share of your prospects are not typing a search into Google anymore. They are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews questions, something like “who is the best paving company near me,” and taking whatever answer comes back. If your business is not part of that answer, the lead never reaches your inbox, and there is a good chance you never find out it happened.
AI tools build their answers from the same signals that build good rankings. A website with real content, a Google Business Profile that is filled out and current, and reviews that back up what your site says about you. There is no substitute for the foundation. The off-season is a smart time to strengthen all three, since AI tools update their answers on a rolling basis rather than waiting for a slow news cycle.
This is one more piece of how to market a seasonal business today, since AI answers now sit above the search results. We track this for clients month to month through our AI Search Visibility work, checking if AI names the business, links to it, or skips it entirely in favor of a competitor.
Even a quick, informal version of this check, searching a few of your own service questions in ChatGPT to see who gets mentioned, tells you roughly where you stand.
4. Ask For Customer Reviews
Online reviews matter more than most business owners give them credit for, and checking reviews is something a lot of people do before they pick up the phone to call the business. If a shopper lands on a page and doesn’t like what he or she sees (ie., no reviews or bad reviews), then it’s less likely you will get the call and more likely the call will go to your competitor.
Getting reviews is not complicated. You simply do a great job for your customer, then ask them to leave you a review while the experience is still fresh. When they say they would be happy to leave a review, make it easy on them by sending them the review link to your Google Business Profile.
97% of consumers read reviews before choosing a local business, and 41% now say they always check, up from 29% the year before.
An unanswered bad review can cost more business than most owners would guess. We cover how in our blog on Reasons You’re Losing Customers That You May Not Be Aware Of. If managing reviews and responses feels like one more thing on an already full plate, our Google review management services handle it in the background.
5. Work On Getting Referrals
As mentioned above, your aim as a seasonal business owner should always be to wow your customers with amazing service and overdeliver on what you promised. When you do that, and you have delivered your service, THEN you’ve earned the right to ask for a referral. The reason most small business owners don’t get as many referrals as they should is they don’t ask. Make it part of your service to ask them. Something as direct as, “Hey, if you know of anyone like you looking for help with I would appreciate you if you give them my card or send them my way. Does anyone come to mind?” It’s simple but effective.
6. Strengthen Your Local SEO and Google Maps Rankings
There are three primary ways you can show up on the front page of Google when someone is looking for what your business delivers. Paid ads (top of the page), Google Maps 3-Pack (middle of the page), and website listings (lower part of the page). Here we are focusing on how to get into the Google Maps 3-Pack.
76% of people who search for something nearby on their phone visit a business within a day of that search.
There are some specific actions you need to take to optimize “under the hood” of your Google Business Page.
There are a few important factors that affect the SEO of your site.
- Getting your business category or categories right is very important.
- Having a well-written business description.
- Optimizing your business services is very important.
Beyond that, it’s also important to take some off-page optimizations to build out the online footprint of your business. This is more technical, and it’s a service that falls under our GBP optimization and management services. We cover the details in The Importance Of Online Directories and share more tactics in Steps For Optimizing Your GMB Listing.
We recently did a video on the importance of the Google Maps 3-Pack and how to get your business showing on Google. For a limited time we’re allowing people who missed it to watch the replay by clicking the button below.
During the free webinar event, you will learn:
- How to optimize your Google My Business page
- The importance of keeping your information active online (no, we don’t just mean on Google)
- How your Google My Business page will help you rank in the Google Maps 3-Pack
- Why rankings are so vital, and how one bad ranking can hinder your business
7. Upsell and Cross-Sell Your Existing Customers During Off-Seasons
Within your customer list are gems just waiting to be discovered. Most small business owners never tap into the potential within their own customer lists. Just because you delivered a service for a given customer doesn’t mean they won’t need your help again or in some other way. Every business is different, but the fact remains that within your customer list is a lot of untapped potential.
Simply setting time aside to call past customers to check in with them has the potential to reveal gems. The conversation may turn into a new opportunity, a new job that they need your help with, or even a referral.
8. Use Email Marketing To Keep In Touch With Existing Customers
A simple way to stay in touch with your existing customers is to keep in regular communication with them. Even if you offer a one-off service like paving a driveway, there’s value in keeping in contact with your customers. Sending them a regular email newsletter can help keep you top of mind with your customers.
Tools like Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign (our personal favorite) make it easy to stay in regular contact with happy clients. Setting up a basic customer relationship management (CRM) system and using it consistently can drive real business your way.
$36 to $42 is the average return per dollar spent on email campaigns, one of the strongest returns of any digital channel. And with a CRM, you will, of course, want to show up in your customers’ email inbox with something of value to make sure they continue to open your emails during slower months. You can provide tips, tricks, and success stories to reaffirm that your customers made a great buying decision working with you.
9. Offer Off-Season Discounts and Special Deals
One strategy we love is to offer an off-season special to get prospects to raise their hands early before the upcoming season. There are a lot of different ways you can do this.
Free Giveaway Contest
Run a giveaway on social media, offering one lucky prospect a free service. One person wins, but the leads pile up in the process, and some of those turn into paying customers down the line.
A Facebook ad campaign centered on a giveaway makes the entries add up fast. One of our paving contractor clients runs this winter after winter and turns a good chunk of those email addresses into paying spring customers.
Off-Season Special Pricing
One of the seasonal businesses we run a Google Ads campaign for is excellent at offering their prospective clients off-season special offers to get them to pull the trigger before they need it to lock in special pricing or a payment plan. They make it easy for their prospects who like to plan ahead to say “yes” to their special offer.
10. Reach a New Season, Market, or Type of Customer2026 update
Off-season revenue does not have to come from the same service and the same customers. A landscaping company can pick up snow removal in the winter. A power washing business that spends summer on driveways can pivot to gutter cleaning in the fall. A pool installer in the Northeast can chase leads in a warmer state during the coldest months.
Geography works the same way. If weather drives your slow season, a business three states over might be entering its own busy stretch right when yours slows down. Some businesses shift their target customer for a season, moving from homeowners to property managers or corporate clients who buy on a different calendar entirely.
None of this replaces your core service. It gives your team something productive to sell while the phone is quiet, and it often turns into a second, smaller season that fills the gaps on your calendar.
11. Build Your Marketing Plan For The Coming Season
One of our favorite activities that we recommend for every business is to take a couple of days in their off-season to do some strategic business planning. You should look back at what was right this past year and look ahead at what you plan to do differently this coming year in the marketing of your business to get more leads and customers coming in.
Map out the new marketing ideas you want to put in place, and who will own getting them done. Budget belongs in that conversation too. We break down how much to spend on marketing if you want a starting benchmark before you sit down to plan. We love working through this kind of planning, so feel free to book a time to chat with our team.
12. Run a Google Ads "Maintenance" Campaign
We run a lot of Google Ads campaigns for a lot of seasonal businesses. One thing some of our savvy small business owners do when going into their off-season is to have us drop their normal lead generation campaign but keep a “Maintenance Advertising Plan” in place. For a campaign like this, we just keep brand targeting ads and remarketing ads running.
This can help protect your brand and stay top of mind with prospective clients on a life support ad budget. It’s super cheap but very effective and a better alternative than shutting it all down completely. If this sounds worth discussing for your business, book a call with our team and we will walk through what it would look like.
Frequently Asked Questions on How to Market A Seasonal Business
Q: What is off-season marketing for a seasonal business?
Off-season marketing is the visibility, planning, and light selling work that continues after the busy season winds down: website updates, reviews, email, and paid ads on a smaller budget. That is the core of how to market a seasonal business, consistent, low-key visibility that does not disappear when the phones go quiet.
Q: When should a seasonal business start marketing for next season?
Right after the current season wraps up, while reviews, photos, and testimonials from the busy months are still fresh. Waiting until a month before reopening leaves competitors with a head start on leads that were sitting there the whole time.
Q: How To Market a Seasonal Business With a Small Budget?
Start with the free or near-free moves: asking for reviews, sending a simple email newsletter, updating your Google Business Profile, and writing blog posts that answer real customer questions. A small remarketing or brand-protection ad budget stretches further than most owners expect, since it targets people who already know your business instead of paying to reach strangers.
Q: What is the best way to stay in touch with customers during the off-season?
Email remains the most reliable, lowest-cost option for most seasonal businesses. A monthly newsletter with a tip, an update, or a customer story keeps you visible without asking for anything in return, and it sets up the ask, a booking, a referral, a review, for when the season starts back up.
Q: What is the biggest off-season marketing mistake seasonal businesses make?
Going completely dark when running a seasonal business. Pausing all marketing the moment the peak season ends feels like a reasonable way to save money, but it hands competitors an open lane and forces a business to rebuild visibility and momentum from zero once the season picks back up. A lighter, consistent presence beats a full stop in nearly all cases.
Q: Does SEO still matter when a seasonal business is closed?
Yes, arguably more than during the busy season. Search engines reward websites that stay active with fresh content and updates. A site that goes quiet for months tends to slip in rankings right as the next busy season starts to ramp up, which is the worst possible time to lose visibility.