Marketing and seasonality

[Lynne]

Just wondered whether seasonality significantly affects anyone's marketing strategies? For example, as regards increasing traffic volume to your sites.

Feedback related to any of the following would be great:

• whether specific seasons relate to the products or services you sell?
• whether traffic and sales naturally spike for your online business?
• whether historical campaign data is maintained and influences your decisions?
• any particular strategies you practice to increase your success rate during holidays and other peak seasons?

[Colin]

Hi Lynne

As a provider of training material we really suffer from seasonal fluctuations. Over the last 15 or so years we have found that the summer is deadly - with the school holidays most staff take their holidays so their is nobody to train. Once the kids go back to school the managers who would buy our products go on holiday - so for us things go very quiet between mid June and mid September. It is only this week that we are seing any upturn in business. We tend to lose most of December too!

So for us the Summer is a time for producing new training programmes, visiting clients and developing new projects - this summer, for example, I spent developing our Bluepark website!

One of the reasons for deciding to develop an online store was to eventually source more products - fire, health and Safety related which will hopefully keep the seasonal lulls to a minimum.

Colin

[Lynne]

Thanks for your reply Colin, really interesting.