Your Best B2B Leads Are Hiding in the Bathroom This Christmas
While your competitors are out of office, your best prospects are online. Most B2B marketers shut down in December. But conversion rates spike, costs drop, and decision-makers are scrolling with budgets to spend.
Let’s be honest about the holiday season.
Most marketeers would tell you that the B2B world shuts down on December 20th. They’ll instruct you to pause your campaigns, schedule your generic “Happy Holidays” post, and wait for the January rush.
They may well be wrong…
Last year at CRKLR, we spotted a trend that bucks the “Out of Office” logic. While overall traffic volume dipped slightly during the festive period, we noticed our Financial Services clients’ conversion rates actually went up.
Why? Because of a little psychological phenomenon we like to call The Holiday Escape Strategy.
The Psychology of the December Scroll
Picture the scene. It’s Boxing Day. You have eaten your body weight in cheese and leftovers. Wine has been consumed. Real Housewives doesn’t drop another episode until the New Year. A drunk uncle is currently explaining why Bitcoin is a scam (or the future, depending on the uncle), and the kids’ noise level from the living room is hitting 90+ decibels.
What do you do?
We do not have the luxury of the “cousins walk” here in the UK. Instead, we quietly slip away, pull out our phones, and likely open Instagram through muscle memory. Most people however are hungover and there is little new content – we open LinkedIn instead, desperate to consume some new digital media.
We noticed this trend is particularly sharp in sectors like Financial Services. While retail is kept busy with Black Friday returns, smart B2B leaders are thinking about “Use It or Lose It” budgets. Many departments have surplus spends they must allocate before December 31st, or face a reduction in 2026.
Combine that budget pressure with the desire to escape tedious board games, and you have a C-Suite executive who is highly motivated to learn more about a new strategic fund or software solution right now, just so they can hit the ground running on January 2nd. And escape being driven mad by their extended family. We have noticed this trend agnostic of country. Some of the most valuable prospects across B2B spaces are likely right in the period where most of your competitors are wrapping up fully for the year, treating post-Christmas as a write off period.
The point of all this?
Don’t blindly follow the orthodoxy that says you must pause all ads by December 21st.
Often, this directive comes from senior stakeholders simply because “it’s always been done that way.” But at CRKLR, we look at the data, not the tradition.
There is a hard commercial argument for keeping the lights on. Digital advertising runs on supply and demand. On December 21st, a massive chunk of competition pulls their budget. They turn off their “Always On” campaigns and retreat.
But the audience volumes (the number of people scrolling) remains high.
When the competition leaves the auction, the Cost Per Mille (CPM) and Cost Per Click (CPC) naturally drop. You are suddenly able to reach decision-makers at a fraction of the usual price.
You are effectively getting a discount on high-value attention simply because your competitors are too rigid to deviate from their “best practice”.
We have ample GA4 and platform evidence to suggest that engagement from traditionally hard-to-reach (and often hideously expensive) B2B audiences actually becomes higher over the festive period.
So this year, CRKLR isn’t telling everyone to wind down. We know that some of the best strategic thinking happens in the quiet moments between the chaos, and if you want to make the most of them, you can get in touch with our team.