Get Your Spikes to Spike Higher
Dave Coyle
Top 1% of dry cleaning and laundry owners in the USA. Business mentor helping you build a Business That Works – not just for your clients but for you, too.
If you’ve been following along, you hopefully have been creating some “always running” marketing. These should be systemized and always going regardless of whether it is a slow season or busy season. Examples are:
- New Mover Mailings
- Onboarding New Clients
- Ongoing Appreciation
- We Miss You campaign
- Asking for Referrals
- Gathering Testimonials
But other marketing strategies and tactics might need to be viewed as variable, based on it being a slow season or busy season. Examples of these tactics:
- How you get the attention of target clients (digital ads, for example)
- Batch texting
- Target Client postcard
- Offering Additional Services
The big question is, do you spend more on these variable marketing tactics during slow seasons or busy seasons? Most regions in the United States have spikes where during certain months, business increases. This might be due to weather patterns, travel seasons, or vacations/schools out. And in many parts of the country, where there are four distinct seasons (fall, winter, spring, and summer), the spring and fall seasons become the busy seasons when there is a change between cold weather clothing and warm weather clothing.
To answer which seasons should get additional marketing resources, I suggest focusing more on getting your spikes to spike higher. Define your busy seasons, get more new clients to come in, get them to come more often, and spend more each time they visit. I think of it like going fishing. Should I go fishing, spend money on live bait, wake up early, get the boat ready, and spend all day on the water if it is a season where the fish aren’t biting? No. Those resources would be better allocated to a time when they are biting. This would yield more results and be a lot more fun!
Marketing is a lot like fishing. Go fishing when the fish are biting! When they’re hungry. Not when they are lethargic and moving very slowly around in deep water. Once you know when the fish are biting, focus on the other important details – what you will use for bait, how you will present it, and how it encourages them to act. Just make sure to deploy your resources when the fish are biting, which is the same as when the clients are hungry for your services.
For us in Kansas, the seasonal allocation of marketing resources looks like this:
Fall – 30% (transition: warm to cold weather)
Winter – 20%
Spring – 30% (transition: cold to warm weather)
Summer – 20%
And if you are interested, we spend 4% of net sales on marketing investments (notice I didn’t say “costs”). That ends up being about $225,000 per year. And it is the oxygen for our business. If we stop making the investments, the business slows. I am happy to pay for it. But I am careful to spend more during busy seasons. We focus on making the spikes spike higher!