We’re sure you’re seeing as often as we are the advice to spend the bulk of your marketing budget around the holidays. And while this applies to most B2Cs, this doesn’t really apply to those in the B2B space.

For retail, ecommerce, restaurant, and local businesses, the last few months of the year are crucial for meeting their yearly goals, which means they’re crucial for advertising. But while these months ramp up in business for B2C companies, they’re rather slow for B2Bs.

We often see our clients wanting to pause their paid activities during this time, citing the slowdown in business. Rather than going dark, we recommend these strategies instead:

• Build your retargeting pools.
  Running high-funnel, low-cost traffic campaigns fills your retargeting audience so when you start running those lead generation campaigns again, you already have a warm audience.
• Utilize down time to run A/B tests.
  It can be overwhelming to even think about changing things up with your ads during the busy season, so use the lull to test audiences, placements, creative and copy, etc.
• Stay top of mind.
  Keep awareness campaigns running for a low-spend way to stay in front of your target audience during your downtime. When you get going again, you’ll have already introduced yourself when they start making purchasing decisions in Q1.
• Invest in conversions.
  Take this time when you have low website traffic to update your website and create new landing pages to support upcoming campaigns so you maximize conversion rates. As a side benefit, updating your site also improves your SEO, which will drive more organic traffic.

When you get back up and running in the new year, you’ll find yourself in a better position to run those lower-funnel ads and really hit the ground running.