Notes for owners · Business growth
Marketing during a slow season: what to cut, keep and start
In a slow season, cut broad reach you cannot trace to an order, keep the search spend that still catches buyers, and start the reminder and old-customer work that busy months push aside.
The GullySales team · Updated 17 Oct 2026 · 5 min read
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When the busy months end, the first reflex is to spread a smaller budget thinly everywhere, or to switch everything off and wait. Both waste money. Cut the broad reach you cannot trace to an order. Keep the narrow search spend that still catches the few people looking now. Start the quiet work that the busy season pushed aside: reminders to people who bought before, and calls to customers who went silent.
Sort every item into cut, keep or start
Make one sheet with three columns and put each marketing activity in one of them. Use these rules rather than gut feeling.
| Column | Rule | Typical items |
|---|---|---|
| Cut | You cannot name a single enquiry or order it produced | Wide-audience videos, general sponsored posts, "brand" banners, a second listing site nobody calls from |
| Keep | A named buyer found you this way in the last busy season, even at a lower volume | Search ads for your exact product or service, the Google listing, the WhatsApp number, the dealer or channel visit that ties to orders |
| Start | It needs little media money and needs your time | A reminder to last year's buyers, a call to lapsed customers, a service offer, a stock-clearing message to people who asked and did not buy |
Be strict with the Cut column. "Awareness" is not a reason to keep spend in a month when almost nobody is buying.
What to keep, and how small to make it
Do not turn the search account off. A few people still search in a slow month, and they are often the ones who have to buy, such as someone whose appliance has failed. Cut the budget to the terms that match what you sell, remove the broad ones, and lower the daily limit rather than pausing the campaign. If you want a way to decide how low to go, the post on deciding your marketing budget works backwards from orders.
Keep your listing current. Update hours, photographs and the phone number, and reply to every review. These cost nothing.
What to start: the reminder list
Open your last two years of sales and pull out customers who bought in the busy season. Ask what they will need after it: a service, a refill, a spare part, a cover, an upgrade, a repeat order before the next peak.
Send a plain message in the voice you use on the phone: "Your unit was installed in April, and this is a good time for a check before next summer. Shall we fix a visit?" Do not send it to a hundred people at once from an app you have never used. Send twenty by hand, note who replied, and learn the wording before scaling.
Then do the harder part: call the customers who bought before but not last season. The guide on reactivating dormant customers gives the questions to ask first.
For example: an air-cooler dealer in Agra
This is an invented dealer in Agra whose sales run hot from March to June and drop sharply after the monsoon starts. Last year the dealer kept a wide Instagram boost and a banner at a crossing running through July, because "customers should remember us". Together they cost about ₹40,000 (invented), and neither produced a call anyone could name.
This time the dealer sorts the sheet. The boost and the banner go to Cut. The search ads for "air cooler repair Agra" and "cooler pad replacement" go to Keep at a quarter of the busy-season limit. Under Start, the dealer lists the 140 customers who bought a cooler in the last three summers, with phone numbers already on file, and picks the first twenty. Each gets a message offering to service the cooler and store it covered, and the dealer calls the ones who do not reply after a few days.
The slip comes in week two: the same message goes out to people who bought only that spring, whose coolers were new. Several reply, politely puzzled. The correction is to split the list by age of the product, so that new buyers get a care tip and older ones get the service offer. The service visits fill some of his idle technician hours, which was the real aim. It did not fix the season, only made the dead months pay for their technician.
Watch your own time as well. In a slow month the owner is tempted to redo the logo, rebuild the site or sit through software demonstrations. None of that is likely to bring an order next week. Give the first hours to the reminder list and the lapsed-customer calls, and treat anything else as optional until those are done.
What the slow season is good for
Slow months are cheap for testing. A weak message costs less when the stakes are low, and you have time to read the replies. Pick one idea to try, such as a new area, a different buyer type or a rental offer. Write down what result means "continue" and what means "stop". Look at it before the busy season returns.
When not to follow this
If your slow season is a few weeks, the sheet is more work than the problem deserves; just trim spend and call a few customers. If your whole year is slow, you do not have a season problem, and cutting will shrink the business rather than fix it. That needs a different look at who buys and why.
Fill the sheet before you touch the budget
Do the three-column sheet today, before changing any account, and write the first twenty names for the reminder list while the busy season is still fresh in the order book. If the budget is large enough that the cut and keep call is hard, marketing budget optimisation is the service for it, and the marketing section holds the related posts. Once you know what you want to change, tell us what you need.
