- 19 Jan 2021
- 8 Min read
5 ways your business can make the most of quiet shopping periods
- by Emily Park
Every business will experience quiet trading periods. Although, the timing will differ depending on what kind of industry you’re in — for example, if you own a bikini brand, it’s likely you’ll have a boom of sales in the summer when everyone’s preparing for their holidays, and things will slow down in the winter. Or, if you run a travel company that specialises in skiing trips or Christmas-themed excursions, it’s likely to be the other way around.
As a business owner, you might find the idea of having a slow sales period quite concerning, but it can actually be a blessing in disguise. During busy times, you’ll be focused on helping your customers and fulfilling their orders, which means a lot of the other elements of running a business might fall by the wayside. When things quieten down, you should seize the opportunity to work on other areas of your business, so you can improve your marketing, finetune your processes, and prepare for when things pick back up again.
Here, we’re going to outline just a handful of ways in which you can take advantage of quiet shopping periods.
Create a content calendar
During busy trading periods, creating and publishing content on your website or social media accounts might not be your top priority. So, you might have just been writing copy and taking photos as and when the mood strikes you. But, in order to really reap the benefits of creating content, it’s a good idea to have some strategy behind it. You don’t necessarily have to plan every day of the year out, but it’s a good idea to think about your goals and what types of content might help you to reach them.
First, you should choose which platforms you’re going to concentrate on creating content for. Of course, you might want to write copy, blog posts, and guides for your website, but you also need to think about which social media platforms you’re going to use and whether you want to send marketing emails to your customers.
Once you’ve decided where you’re going to concentrate your efforts, draw out a rough plan of the year. This should include any seasonal changes, holidays and events that are relevant to your business, and any special dates, such as when you’ll be releasing a new collection of products. You might also want to mark down any particularly busy shopping days or periods, such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Once you have the calendar mapped out for the next year, think of what kinds of content you could create and when it would be best to publish them. For example, if you’re a shoe retailer, it won’t make sense to publish a sandal buying guide at the height of winter — this would make most sense in the spring or summer when people are more likely to be preparing for the hot weather.
Start by thinking about what kinds of content you’re going to create for your website and then how you could promote or repurpose them through other channels like social media and your marketing emails. Even if you don’t stick to it all of the time, having a plan drawn out will help to keep you on track throughout the year, even when things do start to get busier.
Tweak your site to ensure it offers a great user experience
Do you have a list of website tweaks or fixes you would like to make but that you just haven’t had time for? Quiet shopping periods are ideal for addressing them.
It’s incredibly important that your website offers shoppers the best possible user experience, not only to boost conversions but because of Google’s upcoming Page Experience update. Visitors will expect everything to load quickly, your navigation to be easy to use, and that all of the information they’re looking for is easy to find. If your site is currently lacking in these areas, aim to get them fixed before your traffic ramps up again.
We have a guide to ensuring your site offers a positive user experience, which covers all of the main points you should focus on. From making sure your site is responsive so it will work on a wide range of devices to formatting all of your content in a way that’s easy to read, there are lots of little things you can do that will make a huge difference.
Produce evergreen content you can publish all year round
We’ve already talked about how you should create a content calendar that you populate with season- and event-specific ideas. But it’s also a good idea to build a bank of evergreen content that you can publish as and when you need it.
As the name suggests, evergreen content should cover topics that will always be relevant to your prospective customers, so it can sit on your site forever. For example, if you’re a car parts retailer, it could be a guide to basic vehicle maintenance or a tyre buying guide. Or, if you provide equipment for warehouses, your evergreen content could include a health and safety guide on manual handling.
If you want to start publishing evergreen content on a regular basis, you could commit to getting a new piece live on your site every month. Or, if the content calendar you’ve created is busy at certain times and then sparse at others, you might prefer to keep your evergreen content in the bank so you can publish it when you don’t have any seasonal ideas.
Another benefit of evergreen content is that, because it’s always relevant, you can reshare it as many times as you like, as people will always find it helpful. So, it’s great for helping to fill up your social media feed when things are quiet, too. However, do bear in mind that refreshing and repurposing evergreen content may be helpful.
Continue engaging with your customers
As we covered in our guide to boosting your ecommerce sales during the quiet post-Christmas period, it’s vital that you continue to connect with your customers, even when they aren’t actively buying from you.
During quiet periods, you need to remember that there are still people out there who love shopping with you and who will pay for your products or services in the future. Right now, they might just be watching their pennies or waiting for the right time to make a purchase. If you go quiet on them, they might end up forgetting about your brand and shopping with someone else when the time comes.
Plus, even if someone has shopped with you in the past, they might need to hit multiple touchpoints with your business before making another purchase — especially when it comes to higher-ticket items. So, keep your brand on your clients’ and prospective customers’ minds by continuing to engage with them during quiet weeks or months.
There are a number of ways in which you can do this. Great strategies include retargeting previous website visitors with ads, keeping your social media feeds populated with new content, and sending out email newsletters on a regular basis. This should help to ensure that people think of your brand whenever they’re looking to spend money on the types of products or services that you offer.
See what consumers want from you
Quiet shopping periods also offer a fantastic opportunity to ask your customers what they want from you and your business. This could apply to a range of things, like what kinds of products and services they would like you to introduce in the future, which social media platforms they prefer, what kinds of discounts they’re most likely to take advantage of, and what kinds of content they would find useful.
There are a number of ways in which you can ask your customers questions. Most popular social media platforms now offer tools that allow you to engage with your followers and ask for their thoughts. For example, you can create polls on Twitter and Facebook or ask your followers direct questions through Instagram stories.
If you would like more in-depth information, setting up a survey could be a great idea. You can then share it on your social accounts and through your mailing list. Just remember that, in order to help you out with a survey, your customers will have to give up some time in their day. So, you might need to incentivise them. Perhaps you could offer a discount to everyone who takes part or enter all respondents into a prize draw. Offering something in return is sure to help you get more responses.
While quiet periods certainly aren’t ideal when you’re running a business, almost every company deals with them, they will come to an end, and you can use your new-found free time to focus on other areas of your business. Putting a content plan together, improving your website, continuing to engage with your customers, and asking them what they actually want from you will help you to prepare for when things pick back up again. As long as you’re putting the time to good use, you’ll reap the rewards further down the line.