While it’s tempting to slow down your marketing efforts once summer is in full swing, the slower season is actually the perfect time to ramp them up.
The key to any good marketing strategy is to stay active and consistent. If you let your marketing efforts go stale for even a month, you risk losing valuable mind-share you worked so hard to generate throughout the first half of the year.
To ensure that your business not only stays afloat during this time, but continues to generate new leads, spread brand awareness, and drive traffic, it may be time to rethink your communications strategy. Here are a few ways to avoid a summer slump.
Double down on content marketing
The upside to summer being a slow time for business is that you may find yourself with more time on your hands. If this is the case, then consider using this newfound time to create more content for your content marketing strategy.
Whether ramping up the amount of blog posts your company produces, working on a couple white papers or how-to guides, or even creating engaging infographics, there are numerous forms of content to create that will draw in potential customers. Plus, putting in the work now will prove to be more than worth it down the line once you begin drawing in customers from something you worked on months ago.
Experiment with new channels like PR
Having less eyes on your marketing initiatives is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, you can use this opportunity to experiment with a marketing channel you haven’t tried or don’t normally have time for during your peak season.
For example, if you’ve yet to explore PR for your B2B tech company, then now may be a good time to consider how earned media can strengthen your overall marketing strategy. Not only does media coverage help with brand awareness and reach (and yes, your tech company can still land media coverage during coronavirus), but earned media can reinforce your brand’s overall digital strategy by driving more traffic and engagement to paid and owned content.
Don’t neglect social media
Much like your other marketing channels, your company’s social media accounts must remain consistent and active throughout the summer. It’s essential to keep your audience informed and engaged year round, even during slower periods when there’s nothing new to announce or launch. When it comes to summer, however, it’s important to keep flexible schedules in mind.
If the person who normally runs your company’s social media is going on vacation, for example, then it would be wise to prepare ahead of time so that your social media channels don’t go dark while that person is out. Take advantage of one of the many social media scheduling tools at your disposal to ensure that your company continues to publish social media content. It would also be a good idea to have someone else on the team monitor the various channels for engagement.
Thought leadership
Thought leadership is a commonly underrated marketing tool. One reason is that, as a term, thought leadership has become a catch-all for many different kinds of content creation. At Swyft, we’ve started referring to what we think is a more precise term: thought influence. See our image below for a visual explanation of how the Thought Influencer model works.
When done right, thought influencer content can strengthen your B2B company’s reputation by building credibility and positioning the company as a go-to resource in the industry.
This is not to say that executives should begin posting their expert advice on LinkedIn and your company blog without giving it any thought. Rather, thought influence content requires a strategy just like any other component of marketing and communications. If your B2B tech company hasn’t nailed down a thought influencer content strategy yet, it’s essential to refine and implement one–not only as a way to avoid a summer slump, but also as a valuable tool to utilize for future brand marketing.
Reevaluate your marketing strategy
If nothing else, summer is an excellent opportunity to spend time re-working your marketing strategy.
Take a look at how the first half of the year has panned out. Have you hit your goals? If not, what can you tweak in your marketing plan to ensure you achieve those goals by the end of the year and still meet your bottom line?
When reevaluating your marketing strategy, it’s important to view it through an objective lens and be honest about what’s working and, more importantly, what isn’t. You may have to go back to the drawing board to make sure the basics like buyer personas, campaign messaging and distribution tactics are still a good fit.