7 things to do this summer to improve your marketing

12th, Jun 2018

It’s summer, and for many, work-related activities slow down. For others, summer may offer access to additional help because of interns or the opportunity to hire part-time students. In any event, your marketing efforts should not be put on hold. This can be a good time to do things that often get put off.

1. Revisit your marketing efforts year-to-date. What have you done to market your business this year? What has worked and what hasn’t? Are you on track to meet your goals for the year? If you did not set goals, set them now. You should have a written marketing plan documenting what you want to achieve and how you will get there.

2. Set up one-on-one meetings. Summer is a good time to check in with your contacts. Follow up is an essential part of business development. Go out to lunch or coffee. Find out what is going on with your contacts but be prepared. What do you want to accomplish with this meeting? If you are hoping to get some business leads, information or introductions, think ahead of time about how you can help them with their business. It’s better to give than to receive when you are trying to build relationships.

3. Work on your contact database. Too many businesses have incomplete information on their contacts and house them in multiple databases (e.g., Outlook, billing system, email platform, etc.). That makes it much harder to keep information up-to-date and to leverage it to improve marketing. During the summer have someone work on cleaning up your data – checking that information is up-to-date in all places, looking up missing information, reviewing bounces, segmenting contacts, etc. If you don’t have a list of contacts that you can use for email marketing, now is the time to create one. Email is an important and very cost-effective way to stay in touch with your contacts. Leverage staff if they have the time to do this work or use interns or students who can work on an hourly basis at a lower cost than staff.

4. Create evergreen content that you can use for your marketing in busy months. Evergreen content is content that doesn’t go out of date quickly. Develop blog posts, articles, video or other content that you can use months or even years from now, so you have material you can promote when you don’t have time to create something new.

5. Leverage content you already have. While you are creating content to carry you through the busy times of year, you don’t want to worry about also writing new stuff to market during the summer. Look at what you already have. There is probably information that you can repurpose relatively easily. Also keep in mind that for social media and email purposes, you can repromote evergreen content you wrote previously. Take a blog post or article you wrote a while ago and share it again. Some people may not have seen it the first time or they may not remember it well.

6. Attend summer networking events. During the summer, many groups go on hiatus, but not all of them. Those that have events often schedule more casual networking which can offer the opportunity to network in a relaxed environment. These summer parties may bring out different people than ordinarily attend the regular networking events, so you also meet new people.

7. Do some reading. No one intuitively knows how to successfully build a business. Pick 1 or 2 marketing or business-related books or check out relevant magazines, newsletters or blogs to give you motivation and inspiration to grow your business.

Get started today with these tips to improve your marketing.

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