Are you ready for 2016?

This goes out to all the new businesses that have just started advertising online this year, props! You’ve hit the first couple of hurdles of your online strategy and you’re looking forward to that down time over the Christmas period where you can relax and not have to worry about anything other than the beers being cold and the roast being cooked.

You may even be thinking it would be a good time to save dollars on your advertising, turning off your Adwords account and, happy that you’ll save a couple of hundred over a week or so, you kick your feet up and marvel at your thriftiness.

You’re a couple of days into your holiday and your savvy business acumen sparks, so you decide to do some research while you’re chilling by the pool. You’ve been looking at a piece of equipment the company needs and so you search on Google to find the best price.

“That’s odd,” you think, “people are still advertising for this product, maybe they forgot to turn off their Adwords like I did.”

But then you visit the site and notice that they have a banner above their contact form that reads: Merry Christmas, we’re returning on the 4th of January, please leave your details and you’ll be our first priority upon return.

“Interesting strategy, but I doubt there’ll be many people looking for this now,” you think to yourself as you enter in your contact details.

You lean back and idly thumb through your social media, looking at all the happy photos of your friends and family. Out of interest you check for yourself the search trends over the December period for the past few years and come across the phenomena that shows a marked increase in search traffic over this time.

“Surely this can’t be the case,” you muse, “surely there is more searches throughout the year.”

It puzzles you until you realize that this is precisely the best time for people to search for things that interest them, that you yourself are doing exactly that, researching in preparation for 2016.

You quickly log into your Adwords account and unpause the campaign that was beginning to bring in a small ROI, you maybe reduce your budget, knowing that while you are turning yours back on, others will not. You update your website with a notification to your potential clients letting them know you are thinking of them.

Then you return to your hammock, crack one of those cold beers, and chill out, safe in the knowledge that 2016 will likely have a pipeline ready for you when you return.