Here’s a revelation that will shock you: the home performance business is seasonal. Those of you battling it out daily in attics and basements know this in spades. But the question for this post is whether your marketing program follows the seasonality of the business. We’re keen observers of the home performance industry across the country and, and in our view, too few pros have tailored their plans to this seasonality.
If you're in a climate zone that requires any amount of heating, this is an especially important consideration right now. Labor Day is the traditional kick-off point for marketing all things winter: from skiing to snow blower sales to warm clothing, it's show time. After Labor Day, with the kids back in school and leaves beginning to turn, the consumer mindset begins to look ahead to changing temperatures. This, for obvious reasons, is prime time for home performance businesses.
Here are some thoughts on how best to leverage this seasonality:
Plan, then Execute.
Good marketing programs have distinct planning and execution phases. Ideally, by Labor Day, you aren’t thinking about what you’re going to do. You're executing the plan. This means: if it's a TV ad you're running, have it airing by Labor Day. If it's a PPC campaign, have it implemented. If it's a website upgrade, have it completed.
Scarcity Sells.
Take a lesson or two from Apple. The supposed scarcity of iPads, and lines around the block, helped build demand.
Take advantage of the seasonality of the home performance industry to your advantage. After all, there is an intrinsic scarcity to the work you do: the number of energy audits you complete in the months of September and October is finite, and it takes time to complete the work. Use this as a sales and closing weapon by creating a little fear that if customers don't get in the queue for an audit early in the fall, their chances of getting the work completed before winter are diminished.
Be Mindful of Keyword Seasonality.
The things people are searching for change just as the leaves do. While in the summer people are thinking about problems like hot rooms, humidity and moisture, around Labor Day they start to think about heating costs. Consider adding content to your website that reflects this changing mindset. (For more info on this see our post on keywording strategies for home performance businesses, and our post on using Google's Insights tool to conduct keyword research for the home performance category.)
Tune your Web Content.
Armed with that keyword information, be sure that your most important page content is tuned. Does your core Call to Action speak to the urgency of the coming season? Has your home page content shifted from an emphasis on cooling to heating? Keeping the content on your website fresh and seasonally relevant not only makes for a better visitor experience, but will help your site perform better in search engines. For more information, check out our post on Home Page Best Practices for home performance professionals, or download our white paper on web marketing best practices for home performance professionals if you really feel like diving in deep.
Part of the challenge of seasonality is that too many people awaken to the fact that they need to get some work done on their house on November 1st, and expect the work to be completed by December 1st. If we, as an industry, can capitalize on the preparing-for-winter mentality that homeowners begin to acquire around Labor Day, we can extend the busy season for energy efficiency. This will help get more jobs done before winter hits, keep more families cozy, and save a bunch of people a bunch of money.
Let's do it.
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