In plenty of businesses, the same story repeats itself. Early in January, orders slow down, some quotes go unanswered and the phone rings less until the middle of February. For a number of small and medium-sized businesses in French-speaking Switzerland, whether tradespeople, retailers, practices or service providers, these two months form a real trough. If that applies to you, it already shows in your own figures.
The instinct is often the same: cut. Less advertising, less content, wait it out. That decision can prove expensive, because the slow season gives you something that is scarce for the rest of the year: available time. A company that uses these eight weeks to build its visibility reaches spring better prepared, with pages, content and contacts already in order.
The trough paradox: fewer sales, more decision-making
A slowdown in sales does not necessarily mean a slowdown in interest. In January, some of your prospects are getting ready for what comes next: they compare, they read, they finalise their budgets. A homeowner planning spring renovations may start researching now. A company that wants a new website live in May may begin its search in February.
In other words, immediate demand sometimes falls while future demand takes shape. If you cut all communication during this window, you risk disappearing just as decisions are being prepared, and leaving the field to your competitors.
Priority 1: SEO, the ideal winter project
Search engine optimisation has one characteristic that suits the slow season: it does not deliver overnight. No timeline or ranking can be guaranteed: early signals often appear within a few weeks, and solid results are generally built over several months, usually 3 to 6 months. Work started in January can therefore begin to pay off in spring, just as your business picks up again. The same work started in May may only help later, once your busy season has passed.
What to tackle first
- Technical foundations: loading speed, mobile display, error pages, sitemap. A slow site puts off people on their phones, often before they read the first line of text.
- Service pages: one page per offering rather than a catch-all page. A Geneva company with several services does well to give each one its own properly built page, with a specific search in mind.
- Local search: a complete Google Business Profile, accurate opening hours, recent photos, replies to reviews. The profile is free and is often among the first points of contact.
- Substantive content: a series of articles answering the real questions your customers ask about prices, lead times, comparisons and mistakes to avoid.
Budget-wise, with us the SEO audit is free and ongoing SEO costs CHF 390 per month (see our pricing), with a firm price stated before work starts. SEO also keeps working when you trim other spending, whereas paid advertising stops the day you cut the budget; the two complement each other. A detailed quote by service helps you size the investment to your organisation.
Priority 2: reactivate your existing customer base
This is an often underrated action, and an inexpensive one. You probably have contacts sitting in your inbox, your invoicing software or your address book: people who have already bought, already paid and already know you. Getting back in touch with them often takes less effort than convincing a stranger.
A simple plan to run in January:
- Clean and centralise the database. Gather every contact into a single file, remove duplicates, segment by service type and by date of last purchase. While you are at it, check that you comply with the nLPD, the Swiss data protection act: keep only useful data, and offer a way to unsubscribe in every mailing.
- Identify dormant customers. Those who have not ordered anything for a good while: they already know your work and deserve particular attention.
- Send two useful emails before any promotion. A look back at the past period, something new, a seasonal tip. The offer comes after these two messages, not before.
- Pick up the phone. A few calls to your best customers. Leave the sales pitch aside and ask how the coming months are shaping up for them. Needs may surface as you talk.
Run well, a reactivation campaign can bring useful enquiries for a modest production cost. If your follow-ups are still entirely manual, winter is also a good moment to set up automation for your customer follow-ups, which will spare you from redoing them by hand for the rest of the year.
Priority 3: build your content stock for the year
Many SMEs that give up on social media after a few months share the same problem: they produce day by day. In spring, between two jobs or two contracts, nobody can find the time to write a post.
The solution is to treat content as stock. In January and February you can realistically prepare:
- A video session, plus photos and videos you take or supply, ready to use throughout the year.
- Several months of posts written and scheduled in advance.
- A series of blog articles ready to publish.
- A few short presentation videos or customer feedback clips, filmed with their consent.
A recent phone, daylight and a list of things to film are often enough to get started: the skills of your trade, your products, your workshop, team members happy to appear on camera. Grouping all of this into a single period saves you from hunting for an idea every week and gives the whole thing consistency. A structured content production setup, built from the photos and videos you supply, then turns this material into regular posts, through editing and versions for each network.
Priority 4: prepare spring in concrete terms
Spring gets prepared in February. Three projects to close before the month is out:
- Your offers. Decide now what you will push in spring: which service, at what price, on what terms. An offer defined early leaves time to test and adjust it before demand returns.
- Your campaigns. Ad accounts cleaned up, conversion tracking verified, audiences rebuilt, budgets planned month by month. A campaign launched in a rush risks wasting part of its budget during the learning phase.
- Your processes. How long do you take to answer an incoming enquiry? If that feels slow, deal with it before adding more advertising. A quick reply is often what separates two providers.
The eight-week plan
- Weeks 1 and 2: website audit, customer database clean-up, a numbers review of the past period drawn from your own data.
- Weeks 3 and 4: technical fixes, rewriting the service pages, first reactivation email.
- Weeks 5 and 6: video session, writing the article stock, calls to your best customers.
- Weeks 7 and 8: content scheduling, campaign preparation, finalising spring offers.
The time and budget needed depend on the scope of the project. Move forward in small, regular steps rather than one big week: in a small business, that is often what gets the job finished. If you hand over part of the work, the price is set in the quote, with no commitment, before anything starts.
Key takeaways
January and February can become investment months. Your sales may slow down, but you have more time to build. SEO started in January can begin to pay off in spring. Content prepared in February can feed your channels through to summer. A customer base reactivated in winter stands a better chance of thinking of you when the need comes back.
The biggest risk is doing nothing for eight weeks, then trying to catch up in spring, when you will have less time to give it.