Marketing agency serving Henley Marketing for Henley businesses

A town with a season

Most places trade fairly evenly across the year. Henley does not. The regatta and the festival season compress an enormous amount of trade into a short window, and everything either side is quieter than the businesses here would like.

That changes the marketing job entirely. Content has to exist before the season rather than during it, advertising has to be bought ahead of the demand curve rather than in reaction to it, and the quiet months are when the search work has to be done.

Selling an experience

Hospitality, boating and premium retail all sell something you have to feel to want. Film does that and copy does not, which is why a restaurant with one good film outperforms a restaurant with fifty photographs of plated food.

The practical version: one production day before the season, cut into enough material to post consistently through it, with social media and email carrying it to the people who came last year.

Start with the calendar

Tell us when your year actually happens. The free audit works backwards from that to what needs producing and when, which for a seasonal business is more useful than any list of keywords.

What to do in the quiet months

The temptation in a seasonal town is to go quiet when trade does. That is exactly backwards. The quiet months are when the search work gets done, when next season’s content gets filmed, and when the email list built during the busy weeks earns its keep.

Search in particular takes months to move, so work started in November is what shows up in June. Work started in June is next year’s.

Getting more from the people who already came

A seasonal business usually has a bigger asset than it realises: everybody who visited last year. Captured properly, that list costs nothing to reach and converts better than any advertising.

The practical version is small. Collect the email at the point of booking or purchase, send something worth reading twice a season rather than monthly, and open the season by telling last year’s customers first.

Henley, Marlow, Wargrave and the river towns

The river towns share visitors and share a search market. Somebody planning a day out is not searching by town boundary, and a business appearing across Henley, Marlow and Wargrave catches a good deal more of that planning than one appearing in a single place.

Start with the calendar, then the audit

Tell us when your year actually happens and what you want fuller. The audit works backwards from there. No cost and no obligation.