How do Hamptons businesses market in the off-season?

How seasonal is the East End, really?

Very, but not evenly. The Town of Southampton counted 69,036 full-time residents in the 2020 census and estimates its summer population at about 180,000, concentrated in June through August. East Hampton Town’s own housing plan notes that in 2020 roughly 60 percent of its housing units were counted as vacant, “mainly seasonal houses,” and that many local businesses “require large staffs to meet the demand of the summer season but require far fewer staff during other months of the year.”

What matters for your marketing is how seasonal your area is. Southampton Town’s housing study breaks it down hamlet by hamlet, and the spread is wide:

Share of all housing units occupied seasonally, from the Town of Southampton Housing Study’s hamlet profiles (2018 American Community Survey 5-year estimates). Villages such as Southampton and Westhampton Beach are profiled separately and not shown.

A café in Hampton Bays and a boutique in Bridgehampton face different winters. Start by knowing which one you are.

Who are your off-season customers?

Three groups keep an East End business going between Labor Day and Memorial Day:

• Year-round residents. The people who live here in February. They are fewer, but they buy every month and they talk to each other.
• Second-home owners. Many still own the house in winter. They come out for fall weekends and holidays, and they hire contractors, caretakers and pool, landscaping and HVAC companies from the city. They search from Manhattan or Brooklyn, not from Main Street.
• Shoulder-season visitors. September and October weekends, holiday weeks and spring breaks. The Hamptons Visitors Council, an alliance of local chambers of commerce formed in 1990, exists to promote tourism “especially in the spring and fall.”

What should you do in summer to prepare?

Summer is when you meet the most people, so it’s when you build the list you’ll market to all winter.

1. Collect emails at every touchpoint. Checkout, reservations, Wi-Fi sign-in, receipts, a QR code at the counter. Give a reason to join: first access to winter events or next-season booking.
2. Get text-message consent properly. Federal rules require a customer’s prior express written consent before you send autodialed marketing texts, and a reply such as “STOP” must end them. Use a clear opt-in checkbox, not a phone number scraped from a receipt.
3. Follow the email rules. Under the FTC’s CAN-SPAM guidance, marketing email needs your physical postal address and a clear way to opt out, and opt-outs must be honored within 10 business days.
4. Ask for reviews while the season is fresh. Reviews written in July keep working in January. See how to respond to Google reviews once they arrive.
5. Tag where customers live. Note whether each contact is local, a second-home owner or a visitor. Your winter message is different for each.

This is general information, not legal advice. If texting is a big part of your plan, have your consent language reviewed.

How should your Google Business Profile change with the seasons?

Google’s guidelines are specific here. During the season, set your regular hours; for holidays and one-off changes, use special hours. If you close entirely, Google says “during off-season, you can mark your business as temporarily closed” and set regular hours again when you reopen. If you stay open with shorter winter hours, change your regular hours instead. Either way, make your website say the same thing.

Keep posting through the winter. Business Profile posts come in three types, updates, offers and events, and offer and event posts carry dates. Google archives posts older than six months unless a date range is set, so a stale summer post eventually disappears on its own, but a fresh one tells searchers you’re still here. If your listing has vanished from the map entirely, start with why a business stops showing up on Google Maps.

When should seasonal content go live?

Before people search for it, not when they do. A new page can take weeks or months to be indexed and trusted, so publish the pool-opening page in winter, the fall cleanup page in late summer and the holiday catering page in early fall. The same content is what AI assistants draw on when someone asks for a recommendation; see how to get ChatGPT to recommend your business.

A month-by-month off-season calendar

Event names are examples from 2026 chamber calendars; confirm dates with each chamber every year.

Use the local calendar that already exists

East End chambers run events in the off-season precisely to bring people downtown. In 2026 the Greater Westhampton Chamber’s indoor Winter Market ran from January 3 to April 25 on Main Street in Westhampton Beach; the Southampton Chamber’s SouthamptonFest runs the first weekend of October; and the Montauk Chamber’s Fall Fest is in its 45th year. Sponsoring, exhibiting or simply posting about these events gives you something real to say in November that isn’t a discount.

Off-season mistakes to avoid

• Going silent. If your website and social accounts stop in August, people assume you’ve closed.
• Wrong hours on Google. Summer hours shown in January cost you a customer and a review.
• Deleting or duplicating your profile. Mark it temporarily closed instead of removing it, and don’t create extra profiles for each hamlet you serve.
• Texting without consent. A phone number on a receipt isn’t permission to market to it.
• One message for everyone. A year-round local and a Manhattan homeowner want different things from you in February.
• Letting the phone ring out. Fewer staff in winter means more missed calls. A missed-call text-back catches them.
• Starting summer marketing in May. By then, the search results and the customers’ plans are mostly set.

Where East End Web fits

We’re based in Westhampton Beach and work with businesses that live on this calendar. Most of the above you can do yourself. Where we help is the part that compounds: seasonal hours and posts on your Google profile, pages published ahead of demand, and sign-up forms that capture consent correctly. See how our local SEO works.