Stop spending your marketing budget evenly across the year

Demand is never flat

Trades peak in spring. Retail peaks around long weekends and year end. Clinics fill in January. Education runs on intake dates. Event businesses take enquiries months before anything happens. Almost nothing is evenly spread — and yet the default is a fixed monthly ad budget that never moves.

The gap between deciding and buying

The mistake that costs most is confusing the busy season with the buying season. In many categories the decision is made weeks or months before the money is spent, so advertising hard while you are busy means advertising to people who already chose somebody else.

Work backwards instead. Find out when your customers actually decide, then put the budget there.

How to build the year

• Look at the last two years of enquiries by month, not revenue by month
• Identify the weeks where decisions get made, not where money lands
• Weight the budget toward those weeks, even if it means going quiet elsewhere
• Prepare pages, offers and creative before the window opens, not during it
• Collect reviews right after each busy period, while goodwill is high

Going quiet is a decision, not a saving

Cutting spend during a slow month is often right. Cutting it during the month your customers make their decisions is expensive, and the cost does not show up until a quarter later when the enquiries do not arrive.

If you do not know your pattern

Pull your enquiry data by month for the last two years. Most businesses have never looked at it, and it is usually the most useful hour anyone spends on their marketing plan.