Summer Messaging - Get Your Marketing Plans Ready For Summer
Summer Messaging - Get Your Marketing Plans Ready For Summer
As summer approaches, many of us begin to evaluate our summer wardrobe, check out last year’s beach gear, and make sure our sunscreen has not expired. These are the ways we prepare for a fun-filled summer. With that in mind, you should also prepare your business for the summer. Some businesses are more seasonal than others, and it is important to have an idea of how you will market to your customers during this particular time of the year whether you plan to be extra busy or not.
You may want to identify big summer holidays, sales, events, promotions or closures and renovations that you need to keep your customers aware of. You may also want to look back on the last few months and identify which marketing platforms are working for you and which ones are not. For some businesses, it makes sense to update your website to indicate your seasonal operating hours and offerings. These are all important pieces business owners are thinking about now, in order to have a successful summer season.
Update Your Marketing Calendar
Summer calendars fill up quickly with vacations, BBQs, parades, and long weekends. While you work on your personal calendar months in advance, you should be thinking along the same lines for your business.
Make a list of all the major holidays, promotions, events, sales, etc. and decide when you need to begin getting the word out about them to your customers and how you want to go about doing so. If your business closes for a few weeks in the summer, you will want to make sure you share that information with your customers, too. There is nothing worse than heading out to a coffee shop just to arrive and find out they are closed. Now your customer is inconvenienced and low on coffee, and that’s when negative online reviews start spewing from their fingertips.
Re-Evaluate Your Marketing Channels
How is that membership to the Small Business Owners In The Restaurant Industry going for you? Are you seeing any positive results from that? What about your social media efforts on Twitter? Are you finding any engagement there? How is your Pay-Per-Click Advertising going? Now is the time to make a list of all the ways you’ve been putting your business out there and in which areas you are seeing success and which areas may need to be dropped or reworked. Instead of putting your time and energy into a marketing channel that is not giving you positive results, now may be the time to recognize that your customers are not picking up what you’re putting down.
On the other hand, if you find that there is a particular strategy that is proven to be successful more than anything else you’ve tried in the past, it might be a good idea to invest deeper into that channel. While some marketing strategies are long term, such as SEO, others should show results fairly quickly. Summer is a great time to re-evaluate which marketing strategies are weaker and which ones are stronger.
Copy Is King
If your business is seasonal in nature it is a good idea to take a look at your website and ensure it is up to date with your current operating hours and offerings. If has the special deal that you were offering on Valentine’s Day is still there, now is a great time to remove that. If you offered a promo code for St. Patrick’s Day, you’ll definitely want to remove that offering too.
While removing old information is key, writing new copy for your website that reflects the summer season is certainly a nice touch, as well. Personalizing your website copy for the season you are in draws customers to your website. Customers will want to come to your business and feel confident that what they saw on your website will be what is offered when they arrive, or when their product arrives.
While everyone prepares for summer in their personal lives, you now know how important it is that your business prepares a marketing plan for the summer, as well. And if you feel overwhelmed by calendars, channels and campaigns and copy, we get that too. You’ve got a business to run and when you started your business you didn’t have the nitty-gritty marketing details on the top of your mind. We’re here to help, so if you’re looking to talk about your summer marketing plan just give us a call, and we can find a way to get a marketing plan put together for you before the summer kicks into high gear.
