Summer Marketing: The Living Can Get Too Easy!

We work with a lot of small- to medium-sized businesses, and every summer we notice that our clients kind of disappear. And hey, we get it as small business owners ourselves. It’s hard to have fun and enjoy your summer and still keep up the hectic pace needed to keep your business running effectively.

But here’s our cri de coeur to keep your momentum up during the summer! Basically, make sure not to slack off too much and implement some summer marketing strategies. As we’ve learned and seen from experience, counting on a strong Q4 to make up for a lazy summer usually doesn’t work out. So here are Niki’s tips for maintaining strong business practices in the summer:

• Have coverage if you are on vacation! Don’t let customers or potential customers go without an answer when they call. This means having someone answer your phones, even if all they are doing it telling people that you’re on vacation. And for email correspondence, definitely put up an out-of-office message (and make sure to actually circle back to those people once you get back to work).
• Dial back your online marketing efforts (like Google) but don’t turn them off. When you totally turn things off it takes a long time to get momentum back. Having to work a little on vacation is better than having no clients come September.
• Use social media and email scheduling to your advantage–things like Twitter posts can be scheduled ahead of time through tools such as Hootsuite. Make use of these tools to get ahead.

It is of course essential to take some time off and to reward yourself for all the hard work you put in all year, but the worst thing is when you undermine all of that hard work by taking a few too many shortcuts in the summer. So put the above tips about ensuring coverage and implementing summer marketing efforts into practice to make sure that you are still going strong when summer’s over!

Let us know if you have any other questions about how to practice successful summer marketing. Just don’t be surprised if we answer your call from the pool…