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What to Do With Your Marketing Budget in the Shoulder Season
Demand drops in October and April, so the instinct is to cut spend. That's usually the wrong move, and the reason is that your competitors are doing it too. When advertisers pull back, the auction gets cheaper. Your cost per lead frequently falls right when your call volume does — which means the shoulder season is often when paid media is at its most efficient, not its least.
It's September. The fall shoulder is a few weeks out. This is the decision worth making deliberately rather than reactively.
The thing most owners get backwards
Two separate numbers move in the shoulder season and they move in opposite directions:
| In season | Shoulder season | |
|---|---|---|
| Demand | High | Low |
| Competition in the auction | High | Lower |
| Cost per lead | Higher | Often lower |
| Your capacity to actually do the work | Strained | Available |
The last row is the one nobody counts. In July you're buying leads you may not be able to schedule for nine days, which produces frustrated customers and mediocre reviews. In October you can be there tomorrow, which produces the opposite.
A lead you can service well is worth more than a lead you can barely fit in. That difference doesn't show up in any dashboard.
Where the money should go instead of away
1. Your existing customer list. This is the cheapest revenue available and it's sitting there.
Tune-up reminders, maintenance agreement renewals, and a straightforward "we're in your neighbourhood this month" to people you've served before. These cost a text message and convert far better than anything you'd buy from a platform. Most trades businesses run software that can do this automatically and don't have it switched on.
2. Maintenance agreements specifically. The shoulder season is what agreements exist to smooth. Selling them in October is easier than in July because your techs aren't rushed and the conversation can actually happen at the end of a job.
An agreement holder is a customer you already paid to acquire once. Every year they renew, that acquisition cost amortises further.
3. Unsold estimates from your busy season. Every quote given in July that didn't book is still a person with the same problem. Nobody follows these up manually, and it's the largest recoverable pool in most trades businesses.
4. The work you can't do when you're busy. Photographing completed jobs. Getting reviews from the customers you served in July who you never asked. Fixing the pages on your site that don't say anything. Local SEO compounds, and October is when there's time to do it.
When cutting spend genuinely is right
Not always wrong — just usually reflexive. Cut when:
- Cost per lead is rising as demand falls. It means competitors didn't pull back in your category, and you're bidding into a thin market against people who stayed
- You're not converting the leads you get. Fix that first. More cheap leads into a leaky process is still waste, just cheaper waste
- Cash flow genuinely requires it. A real constraint beats an optimisation argument every time. Just make it a decision rather than a default
What not to do
Don't turn campaigns off entirely and restart in spring. You'll lose accumulated conversion data and pay the expensive learning period again in March, right when the auction is heating up. Reduce budget; keep the campaign alive.
Don't switch software during your busy season, and don't start a migration in October if it'll run into November. If you're changing field service platforms, the shoulder is the window — but only if you can finish inside it.
Don't judge a channel on shoulder-season performance alone. Sixty days minimum, and a channel evaluated only in your quiet quarter will look worse than it is.
Don't stop asking for reviews because volume dropped. Review recency is a ranking factor. A quiet month with no new reviews costs you visibility in the busy one that follows.
The one-line version
Keep the campaigns running at reduced budget, and spend the freed-up attention on the customers you already have. Reactivation, agreements, unsold estimates, reviews, and the site work you never have time for in July.
More on budgeting across the year, choosing a channel, and marketing for HVAC companies.
Written by Jared DeValk, founder of Nashville Digital. Published September 8, 2026.