The off-season marketing checklist for Outer Banks businesses

Winter on the Outer Banks is when the business gets looked after instead of run. The phones are quiet, the staff are fewer and the owner finally has a week to sort out the things that were deferred all summer. Most of them are small, and together they decide whether next season starts clean or starts with a problem. Here is the list we work through with clients each year, the paperwork first.

File the company's annual report (G.S. 57D-2-24 — annual report required). Every North Carolina LLC delivers one to the Secretary of State each year on the prescribed form. We do not print the fee or the due date here, because we could not read the Secretary of State's current guidance when this page was written; look them up on the Secretary of State's site and put the date in your calendar next to your domain renewal.

Confirm your registered agent. If the person named is no longer available, or the registered office has changed, fix it now rather than finding out when legal papers go astray. For owners who leave the island for part of the winter, this is the item most worth checking.

Walk your site against the Justice Department's barrier list. The Department's position is that the ADA applies to websites of public-facing businesses, and its guidance supplies DOJ's concrete accessibility-barrier list: poor contrast, missing alt text, uncaptioned video, forms without labels or error messages, and navigation that needs a mouse. Try your booking form with only a keyboard. Enlarge the text and see what breaks. Note what fails; fix it before spring.

Reread your privacy policy against what the site actually does. New booking tools, new newsletter sign-ups and new analytics added during the season are all data you now collect. The policy should say so, and anything you no longer need should be deleted properly rather than left in a plugin's database.

Check who owns the domain and the hosting account, and that the login details are yours. Owners discover these belong to a former employee or a previous designer at the worst possible moment.

Then the marketing itself: update seasonal hours and prices, replace last year's photos with this year's, refresh each town page you serve, answer the three questions customers asked most last summer, and make sure every claim on the site is one you can still stand behind.

Paperwork, accessibility, privacy, ownership, then content — in that order, in the quiet months. It is the least glamorous week of the year and the one that makes the busy ones easier.