Each year presents you and your customer’s opportunities to take a break from the busy daily activities. Summer is such one time of the year when your customers want to be away as they enjoy the summer holidays. Therefore, it might become harder for digital marketers to effectively target them. This is because over the summer holidays they indulge in different activities, try new things and travel to different places. On the other hand, you also don’t want to miss the exciting summer activities! However, there are proposals to write, products to sell and events to plan! If you are a marketer, you would want to learn different summer digital marketing tips to ensure you don’t experience the summer sales slump.
In this article, you can find the secrets that will be able to keep active your social media strategy over your summer holidays. This will ensure that even as you enjoy summer barbeque, your favorite drinks and as you interact with your friends, you will still be making enough sales. Keep reading to find out the tips that you need to consider. Let’s get the ball rolling.
#1 Take Advantage of an Intelligent Brand Management Application
Over the summer holidays, even digital marketers want to take a breather. However, as said there are products to sell, aggressive competitors to monitor, customers to respond to. Through the use of special software, marketers can effectively achieve some of the above. This allows the full-time marketers an opportunity to enjoy their summer breaks. However, you need to carefully choose software that allows you to achieve the above in summer.
Mentionlytics helps businesses to find market leads by monitoring happenings about specific industries. In addition, the application allows marketers to monitor what their competitors say and what their followers say. The findings are compiled into one compressive report making it easier for marketers to respond even when enjoying summer holidays.
Therefore, through an intelligent brand monitoring application, marketers can effectively discharge their duties. There will be no need to stay in office during summer, monitoring what the clients and competitors say on social media. Therefore, if you are a marketer, don’t be left out as others enjoy their summer holidays. Take advantage of a software to handle some of the pressing tasks that could keep you in office for longer over summer. You can respond through a few keystrokes while enjoying your road trip or while enjoying your summer barbeque. Indeed, this is a great summer digital marketing and monitoring tip for marketers.
#2 Take Advantage of Social Media Retargeting
Retargeting is a handy strategy, through which marketers can effectively target their clients so long as they are online. Facebook and Google allow digital marketers to retarget their clients so long as they have visited a certain website. Therefore, as your clients search for top summer destinations on Google, through retargeting they are able to see your ads. This helps in ensuring that your brand still earns high awareness during summer.
Imagine a scenario where a restaurant targets customers who are in certain office blocks during the working days. If these people who work in the specific blocks are planning to take summer breaks off work, then it means the restaurant is likely to experience sales fall this summer.
However, if the restaurant owner takes his or her targeting further and includes targeting them through Facebook and Google, the experience is different. Ideally, as they relax and search for summer movies online, your Ads will be shown, and as such you have higher chances of making sales to them. The same applies to other businesses.
Therefore, you can apply this summer tip. This is because fewer people off work are likely to open your e-mails, and will browse different websites other than where you have placed your ads. There are different ways through which you can implement summer targeting on Google and Facebook. This includes targeting those who share your ads often during other seasons of the year, those that have not opened your email or target generally all past clients.
#3 Create Fresh Customized Summer Themed Content
To drive traffic to your website over summer, you ought to customize the content using targeted keywords (Business.com). Consider the fact that the needs of your customers will change over summer. For instance, if they are college students, they will not be searching for assignment-related topics. Instead, they will be searching for summer activities among other topics. Therefore, you might consider coming up with content that suits and relates to their needs at this particular time. For example, you can publish topics on “Summer Holiday Ideas for Students”. Generally, the idea is to ensure that your customers still remember your company products even as they search for what interests them at the particular time.
Consistently publishing customized content is a summer digital marketing technique that has helped several businesses to increase their revenue during summer. To effectively implement this technique, you need to think of what it is that your customers will find interesting during summer. What products will they be using mostly? Which places are they likely to visit? And most importantly, you can use keyword search tools to find out high volume low competition keywords. This is a good approach to ensure you can come up with relevant content on the topics.
As a tip on the iceberg, more people will favor fun and light content over summer. Therefore, you can customize ads and content that is fun based. In addition, share these ads on Facebook and other social media channels including targeting your clients through Google and showing those links to customized ads and content.
For example, Coca-Cola has chosen a themed tweet on their twitter page this summer to promote their products through the hashtag #ShareaCoke. See the image below.
#4 Run a Summer Themed Social Media Contest
Another best summer digital marketing strategy to keep sales from experiencing a slump is keeping the customers busy through a summer themed contest on social media (themuse.com). Run a summer contest on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest or any other favorite social media platform. The main advantage of this technique is that it is entertaining. As illustrated earlier, you will find that most of your clients will be looking for more ways to have fun in summer. Why not provide a good alternative by running a summer themed contest?
Before you have the themed summer social media contest, you should ensure that you have the following clearly defined:
- A clear objective
- Tie the contest prizing to what your clients like over summer
- Offer a sharing incentive to promote social media shares
- Consider paid social ads to promote the contest
- Have a clearly defined budget and a timeline for the contest.
There are various types of a contest that you can run on social media. These include the following:
- Sweepstakes/Giveaway Contest: These are more common, and they will attract a high number of participants. Your target audience or fans will enter some details so as to participate. Therefore, you can use the giveaway contest to find out your customer’s favorite activities over summer and use the feedback to target them through customized content and ads.
- Photo or Video Contest: you can post videos or images and invite comments and likes for an opportunity to win a prize. This is an ideal contest if you want to increase engagements on your website during summer.
- Polls and Quizzes. For this type of contest, you ask a question for your followers to answer through comments or selecting an option from given choices.
#5 Take Advantage of the Current Affairs
Even during summer holidays, there will still be current affairs. The current affairs offer a good summer digital marketing strategy for the marketers. This is because even as your customers enjoy their summer holidays, they still will want to be up to date with what is happening. This is regardless of whether they are home or away.
In the current day and age, current affairs become part of what is trending on social media. Ideally, people use the social media platforms to express their views and share the current affairs. Therefore, you can take advantage of these forums to advertise your products and services. This way, you will be able to promote your products and increase brand awareness during summer. Another great advantage is that current affairs will attract a huge audience. This includes your existing customers and those who don’t know about your brand. Therefore, this becomes a good forum for attracting new clients.
You can keep track of the current affairs by checking out hot topics on social media. A good example is the Twitter Trending.
For example, Red TV a Sports channel took advantage of trending hashtag #WorldCupRussia2018 and run the following post. This was so as to increase engagements with the football fans.
By taking advantage of the trending topics, you will be able to capture the attention of dozens of new clients. However, this is only possible if you post information that will attract the audience following the trending topics. Avoid sharing straight marketing messages, but customize the post to suit the interest of the target audience. This is exactly what Red TV was trying to do by taking advantage of the Worldcup tending games as illustrated above.
#6 Take Advantage of Social Media Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a rewarding summer digital marketing strategy. More so, great results will be achieved if run on social media posts. Remember that the summer holidays offer a great opportunity for people to be on social media. In addition, summer holidays are a time for people to check out what the people they like and admire are saying on their social media pages. Therefore, taking advantage of the social influencers will reward you because there is a huge chance of reaching out to the target audience.
In this regard, choose a well-known social media influencer whose summer activities will be aligned with what your brand can offer. This will also influence those who follow the social media influencer to copy what he or she posts on social media. Ultimately, you will realize a high Return on Investment as a result of a well-targeted social media influencer marketing.
For example, Nike chooses Cristiano Ronaldo for the Facebook adverts running under hashtag #JUSTDOIT. This has helped the company to reach out to more than 100 million people who follow the footballer. Through such an initiative, Nike adverts featuring Ronaldo attracts millions of views on Facebook. Here is an example:
To Sum Up
These are some of the best strategies for an effective social media strategy during summer holidays. By implementing either of the above-suggested, businesses can be able to avoid the summer sales decline.
For example, by taking advantage of influencer marketing, marketing through trending topics and news, you are able to keep your audience engaged. Alternatively, you can offer summer themed content, run summer themes contests on social media and retarget your existing clients even during summer. These will drive more traffic to your website. For the marketers who want to enjoy breather during summer holidays, taking advantage of an intelligent brand management application will pay off well.
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