Winter marketing checklist for snow, storms and the quiet months

Is winter your busy season or your quiet one?

Winter does opposite things to different trades. A plow operator, a furnace technician or a plumber who fixes burst pipes can have the hardest weeks of the year in January. A house washer, a lawn crew or an exterior painter in the same town might not have a job on the board. Plenty of companies are both: the lawn company that plows, the window cleaner that hangs holiday lights.

So start by sorting your services into two lists. Winter-busy services need the company to be reachable and reliable when conditions are worst. Winter-quiet services need the company to use the downtime to prepare a better spring. The checklist below covers both, month by month, then adds a storm-day routine. For ideas on what to sell during the quiet stretch, our slow season ideas go deeper; this page is the operating checklist around them.

How does winter differ by region?

December: get the winter phone and profile right

Phones

• Write down what happens to a call at 2 a.m. on a holiday. If you take emergencies, test the after-hours route from a cell phone. If you don't, the greeting should say so and give your next open day.
• For winter-busy trades, decide who is on call each night and how calls reach them. A shared calendar and a call-forwarding rule beat "call the owner's cell".
• Turn on a missed-call text so a caller who hangs up gets an answer while they're still looking for help.

Google Business Profile

• Set holiday hours for Christmas and New Year's. Google reserves special hours for short changes and asks businesses shut for a week or longer to use the temporarily closed setting instead (How to set special hours). If you close the office but still answer emergencies, say that in a post.
• Add winter services to the services list. "Emergency no-heat repair" and "snow plowing" should appear if you do them.

Website

• Winter-busy trades: put the emergency number and service area at the top of the mobile home page, with plain words about what you handle after hours.
• Winter-quiet trades: change the home page to what customers can do now (book spring, buy a gift certificate, ask for an estimate) instead of leaving a summer offer up for three months.

Crew

• Brief the winter crew on what to say to customers during a storm: when you'll arrive, what you can't do, how to reach the office.
• For quiet trades, decide who stays on through winter and what work they'll do. Training, equipment rebuilds and photo shoots for the website are all real work.

The storm-day routine for snow and emergency trades

For contract customers, a storm is a customer service event first. What they want is to know you haven't forgotten them.

1. Before the storm: send booked and contract customers a service text with your plan: when routes start, what triggers a push, how to report a problem. Messages about service a customer already bought are different from marketing; our SMS rules guide explains the line.
2. During: update your Business Profile and phone greeting with the status ("crews out since 3 a.m., residential routes running about two hours behind"). Answer the phone with a person or a system that can log the address and issue.
3. After: close the loop with each contract customer. A simple "your driveway was cleared at 6:40 a.m., reply if anything was missed" prevents a lot of angry calls.
4. Next day: log every complaint in the CRM with the address and what happened. Those notes decide which routes need a second truck next storm.

Severe storms that damage homes are a different situation. Our storm response marketing guide covers how to help after one without fear tactics or price gouging.

January: build the assets spring will need

For quiet trades, January is the cheapest month of the year to improve marketing, because your time costs nothing in lost jobs.

• Website pages: write or rewrite one service page and one town page a week. Use last season's real photos and the questions customers asked. Our guide to service area pages shows what makes them useful instead of thin.
• Photos: sort last year's job photos by service and town. Upload a fresh batch to the Business Profile.
• Reviews: reply to every review from last year that never got an answer, positive and negative.
• Customer list: merge duplicates, fix bad numbers and emails, and mark text consent. The spring prebook campaign is only as good as this list.
• Accounts: confirm you own the logins for your domain, website, Google profile and phone numbers. If a former helper or agency owns any of them, fix it now, while no customer is waiting.
• Sun Belt: January is already prebook time for spring AC tune-ups, pool openings and pollen-season washing. Start the spring checklist now.

February: line up the spring launch

• CRM: pull last year's spring customers by service and town, plus open quotes from fall.
• Email: write the spring prebook email and text now so they go out on schedule. Snow belt companies often send in March; earlier if your spring starts early.
• Snow contracts: ask winter customers for feedback while the season is fresh, and note who plans to renew.
• Hiring: post spring jobs. The best seasonal workers sign with whoever asks first.
• Pricing: settle next season's prices before the prebook email goes out. Raising prices after customers have booked is a harder conversation. If costs went up, test new prices in the job price calculator.
• Pacific Northwest: start moss and roof cleaning outreach for the first dry stretches, and keep a list of customers who can be flexible on dates.

Common winter mistakes

• Going dark. A Business Profile with no posts since October and a home page still selling summer services tells January searchers the company might be closed.
• Taking emergency calls you can't serve. If you can't get there tonight, say so. Customers forgive an honest "first thing tomorrow" more readily than a no-show.
• Running promotions during a storm. People dealing with no heat or a blocked driveway don't want a coupon. Send status, help and the phone number.
• Leaving the spring launch until spring. The prebook list, the email and the hiring plan all take longer than you think. Start in February at the latest.

What should you measure over the winter?

Winter numbers look different from summer numbers, so measure the right ones. For winter-busy services, track calls answered versus missed on storm nights, the time from call to arrival on emergencies, and complaints per storm by route. Those tell you whether to add a truck, an on-call tech or a better phone setup next year. For winter-quiet services, track what you built: pages published, photos uploaded, reviews answered, customers cleaned up in the CRM, and spring jobs prebooked by the end of February. Then compare the prebooked count with last year. If it went up, the quiet months did their job. If it didn't, look at who you contacted and when. Our numbers to track list covers the rest.

If your winter phones depend on one person's cell, that is the first thing to fix. Our business phone systems route calls by time of day and on-call schedule, and text back the ones nobody can take.

Frequently asked questions