Adapt your marketing strategy for the summer holiday season

Unless you happen to sell ice, barbecues or anything holiday-related, it’s a fact that the summer marketing slowdown sees a change in the pace of business for various reasons, and this should be factored into your marketing efforts.  

Spending more time engaged in enjoying outdoor activities or travelling doesn’t just change the way people feel and think, but also the way they shop too.

That means it makes good business sense to adjust your marketing activities during the summer holiday season if you’re to reach the right audience.

Let’s play marketing chess

How do you handle the potential challenges, such as factory shutdowns, decision-makers being on leave or a shift in consumer habits, and the fact that your traditional outbound marketing efforts might well be less effective during this period?

This is where the power of inbound and nearbound marketing strategies come into their own.

Inbound marketing

Imagine trying to sell door to door over summer. People are going to be in their gardens, on days out, on holiday, or peering out at you tentatively through their blinds. It’s an inefficient strategy at best.

What you need is to make people come to you by honing your inbound marketing channels. Summer is a great time to dive headfirst into a pool of keywords and write some content to improve your SEO or create strategic content for your social media channels.

Your approach should be to make your inbound marketing focus around content creation with a lighter feel that caters to potential needs and interests during the summer (even if not directly purchase-driven).

Your goal is to deliver low-cost marketing that helps support passive lead generation and strengthen your brand awareness. It’s important to bear in mind that this isn’t the answer to getting more sales over the summer period; it’s about being strategic with your budget and choosing your battles.

Nearbound marketing

Summer also presents an excellent time to focus on strengthening relationships with existing customers and partners through the use of account-based marketing (ABM) activities that don’t rely solely on immediate outreach to individuals.

You can target existing customers with email marketing, which may still hit the same barriers as outbound ads, but at no extra cost. Something like a referral campaign could help boost engagement from existing customers and bring in new customers at the same time, all for the sake of a few Amazon vouchers.

In addition, you could explore opportunities for softer engagement through events. You could host community events for your customers and make use of the summer weather, or get out and amongst your customers and collect reviews and testimonials.

So, what about your outbound allocation?

The first thing you need to do is review your past performance of paid ads over the summer. If it’s a period where outbound activity has been a success for your business, there’s no reason it shouldn’t be again. But if you do notice an annual dip over the summer, you could save outbound budget allocation for peak times.

Look at optimising your ad content and keywords to appeal to a different demographic during the summer holiday period, who are more likely to be at work and spend some time experimenting with what works.

It makes sense to reserve your outbound budget efforts for periods when you have more potential for higher ROI, which you can use historical data to pinpoint, as every business will be different.

Advice on a postcard

Build your summer marketing strategy around inbound and nearbound strategies to improve relationships with existing clients and boost your organic presence and brand awareness. By saving your bigger campaigns and outbound efforts for busier times when they’ll have the most impact, you can achieve a higher return on your investment

Want to give your business marketing strategy a year-round advantage? Talk to the team at Harrison Carloss