Summer Marketing Tips to Free Up More Beach Days

Make Your Holiday Setup Your Usual Setup

Typically, during the busy holiday period, business owners hustle to create their marketing plans, schedule content, and automate their campaigns to cover their time off. But here’s the question: why limit productivity to just the holidays? What if this setup became your year-round approach? By planning and automating your marketing ahead of time, you can make the most of your summer days without constantly worrying about what’s happening behind the scenes.

Here’s how to keep your digital marketing plan going while you enjoy the summer

Create a detailed marketing plan:

Outline the entire summer season, focusing on key dates and milestones.

Design all your marketing images in advance:

Batch-creative visuals to align with your summer campaigns, ensuring a consistent message across platforms.

Set a clear budget for ad spend:

Know your limits so you don’t overspend while you’re away from the office.

Schedule your advertising in advance:

Use tools like Google Ads or social media schedulers to plan campaigns that will run autonomously.

Decide how inquiries and responses will be handled:

Whether it’s customer service calls, emails, or social media, ensure you have a system in place.

Delegate tasks where possible:

Assign duties to team members or external partners to lighten your load.

Automate everything where possible:

From email campaigns to social media posts, use marketing automation tools to reduce manual work.

Make use of summer events, if they’re a good fit

In summer, the way we relate to the world is different. We are outside more. We’re more social. We eat differently. We often do different things with the longer hours of sunlight. In business, summer changes what you can say to people.

• For surf shops, summer is the perfect time to deliver the right message: Upgrade your summer gear before you hit the beach.
• For bike shops: The Tour Down Under is the perfect time to sell bikes, accessories, and the idea of being part of the big race.

Take advantage of key dates to keep it interesting

Campaign scheduling that takes advantage of key dates makes starting and ending campaigns easy. You can book-end your campaigns with significant dates.

For example:

• From Australia Day to Valentine’s Day
• From Valentine’s Day to Writers’ Week.

Define your own summer calendar based on key dates, and build your campaigns to fit. It will stop you wondering what to promote or schedule.

What are the benefits of using set dates?

• You’ll naturally build campaigns that are focused on what matters to your audience at that time.
• Pre-determined dates provide instant structure and guidance.
• It makes brainstorming new campaign ideas much easier.

For instance, create campaigns like “Valentines Day Gift Ideas” to tap into your audience’s natural interests.

Know what people are searching for… then help them find it

One under-utilised tip that really helps is to know what your ideal clients are looking for. Then, make it easy for them find it.

It sounds simple, and in principle it is. But in practice it means looking at your data over the past summer periods to understand common search patterns. Then, adjust your advertising and search engine optimisation strategy to address it. In some cases, this might mean rethinking what you offer. If you usually run life drawing courses in summer, but your data shows people are searching for water colour classes, consider changing the program to meet people’s needs.

Know how to respond, then delegate and automate!

Sitting down and really thinking about how to respond to people is an important element of any marketing plan.

Think about:

• Will customers go through to a call team?
• Do you need to think about responses in social media?
• How are emails being handled?
• Who is on leave at this time of year, and will that change your ability to respond to people?

Then, break up the work into small pieces and delegate it effectively. Automate whatever you can and schedule ahead. Pre-scheduling posts, emails, and ads is powerful and convenient (especially when the beach is calling).

Schedule your check-ins

No matter how well you do all the steps above, you still have to check in on how your marketing plan is going. It requires hands-on review and sometimes responses. Everything that you can schedule or action up-front is the equivalent of banking time that you can spend elsewhere. And it stops you constantly thinking about it!

This is why you need to schedule your check-ins. Keep notes at each point about what you’re checking and why. Then set a timer and use the time productively.

By following these simple tips, you will discover the freedom of a well-managed online marketing campaign. It’s not something that you should think about all the time. Especially when you’re relaxing with friends!

If you’d like more information about how you can achieve summer-time freedom, contact our friendly team today . 

Now start packing your beach bag!