Is summer one of your slowest seasons? Getting customers and fans to engage with content can be extra difficult during the summer months due to busier schedules from traveling, summer camps, and overbooking BBQs. Heat things up by turning your marketing efforts up a notch and attract customers regardless of their busy summer schedules. The marketing ideas below will help get the sizzle back into your marketing this summer.
Take Advantage of Summer Holidays
Holidays make for great promotions, especially big holidays. Customers will wait until an upcoming holiday to make purchases, expecting sales to always take place around federal holidays like the Fourth of July and Labor Day.
Thomas King, a vice-president at J.D. Power and Associates, claims Labor Day is one of the busiest days for car dealerships thanks to the 3-day weekend and the next year’s model cars starting to appear on the lots. Both Fourth of July and Labor Day can also be used to create new content and design themes for email newsletters and blog posts.
Back to school is an “unofficial” holiday, but another great opportunity for launching a summer promotion. Is your business product or retail based? Offer a unique “Back to School” special for parents and students to take part of weeks before school starts to help stock up on supplies with. Since most school schedules are different, it’s safe to start a back to school promotion late July and the beginning of August.
Create a Content Calendar That Makes Summer Sizzle
Own an insurance agency? Create new content about road trips, car insurance, and the importance of having home insurance in case of a robbery while on vacation. Get creative and find ways to include the warm summer months in new content. Use how-to’s for summer related activities, what’s out of style for the next three months, or ways to improve health, there’s something for every type of industry.
Host a Summer-Themed Contest
Using Facebook and/or Instagram advertising, host a contest to get fans motivated this summer. The contest objective can be as simple as re-sharing a post or asking fans to submit a photo/video. Whichever objective you chose, make sure the goal of the contest aligns with what the company does and has a prize to match. Using advertisements on Facebook and Instagram will increase the amount of people who see the contest and ultimately the amount of overall entries the contest receives.
Here’s a few rules you’ll want to require when hosting a summer contest:
- Make sure each person @ mentions the business to gain extra traffic to the business page.
- Require sharing as part of the steps. Re-posting and sharing will increase the exposure of the contest and the business without paying extra in advertising.
- Direct followers to a landing page to gain additional entry points. The landing page can have an opt-in form to collect lead data and sharing buttons to make it easy for followers to share the contest with their friends and family.
Hose Down Your Website
Summer is a great time to give your website a deep cleaning. The first half of the year has already been completed, plenty of campaigns have run, and you should have enough data to analyze what kind of improvements the website needs. Follow the checklist below to update your website over summer.
- Check for broken links. Even if there is a broken link plugin installed on the website, login and check the website frequently for broken links. It’s important to do a large sweep at least 1-2 times a year to ensure all links are working properly.
- Update meta descriptions. When was the last time you reviewed the meta descriptions for each page on your website? Content changes over time and websites are frequently updated. Meta descriptions need to stay relevant and match the content for each page. Afterall, that is one of the only opportunities webmasters have to explain what a page/website is about in search results.
- Optimize images and reduce image size. Large image files are one of the leading causes for slow loading websites on both desktop and mobile. Install an image optimization plugin like EWWW or WP Smush to the website or manually check each media file to reduce image sizes. A good rule of thumb is that most of your images should be around 800 pixels wide.
- Check the site speed. Optimizing images is one way to increase the site speed of a website, but there are several other objections that could be delaying the load time (and ultimately the ranking) of your website. Check the desktop and mobile site speed using Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
Dust Off Your Keywords
Not only could your website use a hose down, but your keyword strategy could use a refresher. Automate your SEO monitoring, track local rankings, and recover (not provided) keywords with our industry leading SEO software. With our Now Provided reports, you can find new keyword targeting opportunities that went missing when “not provided” was rolled out for everyone. We combine data from various sources including our own rank tracking and Google Analytics to show you which keywords are driving traffic to each page on your site.
Use this report to prioritize SEO focus, plan new summer-themed content, and improve under-performing landing pages this season.
