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Recently, I did an interview with BtoB Magazine about why it’s important for B2B companies to continue their marketing campaigns throughout the holiday season. The interview was prompted by a blog post we wrote last year – Are You a Marketing Santa or Scrooge?
The gist of my argument was that, contrary to popular belief, the whole business world doesn’t come to a screeching halt in the month of December. And there are some really great opportunities that marketers can take advantage of around the holidays (just like all those daily deals emails you’re getting from every store you’ve ever shopped at… and some you’ve never shopped at).
To further explain my logic on holiday marketing, I wanted to share some of Capterra’s experiences and lessons learned from B2B marketing in Decembers past:
- Capterra witnesses a 10-20% decline in website activity every December. The first three weeks aren’t that bad – maybe a 5% drop. But then it usually craters during the last 10 days, leading to an overall drop for the month of 10-20%. While that number is definitely significant, I believe many marketers assume that people just stop researching software altogether – and work in general – in December. So many advertisers wrongly guess that the drop will be more like 50%, and they limit their success more than necessary by cutting ads. In turn, their traffic probably does drop by 50% because they’ve cut their marketing programs, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that marketing during the holidays yields poor returns.
- Part of the beauty of pay-for-performance channels like Google, Bing, and Capterra is that marketers don’t have to worry about reducing their budget since their overall spend on clicks will automatically drop with the decline in activity.
- For more traditional B2B channels that are not pay-for-performance (print, email, direct mail, etc.), it makes sense that software companies should drop their ad rates by about 10-20% (assuming Capterra is representative of the broader B2B software market). But…with so many marketers overreacting and cancelling ALL of their spending for the month, these channel vendors may have to drop their rates even further for the month of December to win business, which is a great opportunity for marketers to take advantage of those artificially reduced rates.
So, as your day-to-day workload winds down this month and you begin to focus on 2013, start experimenting with some new marketing programs. Change up your ad copy on PPC campaigns, send some thank you emails to existing customers, and explore whether there are any deals for new advertisers on channels you’ve never explored before (after all, it is supposed to be the season of giving).
You might not see the wild success that you’d typically experience during your busiest months, but if you evaluate these campaigns relative to your overall December company performance , you can determine which channels are worth continuing in the New Year!
