When you’re running a small or medium sized business we all need some down time, what better time to take a break than over the summer? More often than not so are our clients. It pays to plan ahead and put measures in place to keep things ticking over while you take a summer break. Whether you’re jetting off on holiday or simply spending time with the kids over the school holiday, we outline below some great marketing tips to help you keep in touch with your target audience.
Plan ahead
The first of our marketing tips is all about planning. When you are building your marketing strategy and plan for the summer months, start tying up loose ends as early as a month in advance. You don’t want to be worrying about too many projects while you’re supposed to be taking downtime and enjoying yourself. Plan all of your important meetings before you go away, and leave yourself enough time to action follow-ups. CLICK HERE to receive your FREE social media plan to help.
Write and schedule blogs
Writing blogs, articles and other great marketing content can be time consuming and not something you’ll want to dedicate resources to over summer. Aim to have enough content lined up in advance, and then use a scheduling tool (on WordPress, for instance). You can then sit back and relax as your content is posted for you.
Emails
As with lots of other marketing set your emails up to deploy whilst you are enjoying your break. To help manage the email inbox, if you usually work on a desktop PC, make sure to set up your inbox on your phone so you can have easy access during your holiday, should you need it. I’d suggest scheduling ten minutes every couple of days to check your inbox, so you don’t miss out on new opportunities, of course the optimum is to relax and enjoy your holiday to fully recharge.
Schedule social media
There are many social media scheduling tools out there e.g.: Buffer, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, etc, which one works best for you is often down to personal preference and which social media networks you use. Hootsuite is a personal favourite and fantastic tool for managing your social media channels over your holiday. It allows you to quickly and easily schedule posts across Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Instagram… the list goes on. The interface is intuitive – you manage everything including content, timings and images from a single dashboard split into channels for the different sites. You can sign up for an account here – why not give it a go on a free ‘Pro’ trial before committing to a ‘Business’ account? If you feel like you may not have enough content to last over your holiday, you may like to get some mileage out of old content by linking out to popular articles or videos, etc. CLICK HERE to receive your FREE social media plan to help.
Some support
Depending on the size of your business, you may like to select a colleague, trusted, right-hand man or woman – to supervise your workload while you’re away. Once you’ve decided whether or not you’ll have a go-to colleague to cover your work, set up your “Out of Office” accordingly before you take leave.
Aim to retain clients by keeping them happy and letting them know your plans in advance. Let all of your active clients know in advance who they can contact during your time away. An email CC’ing in your colleague will suffice, unless you’re in the middle of working on a project with the client in question. If you work alone, send an email or make a phone call to reassure your client that everything will be in hand.
Getting back to work
Of course we all have to return to work at some stage, to make this as easy as possible make sure you have something to be getting on with booked in for the week you start working again. Focus on something that helps you to get re-energised and refocused.
Last but not least have a brilliant summer break and enjoy!
Research
http://birdsontheblog.co.uk/6-ways-holiday-proof-your-business/
