August is often said to be a quiet business month but this should not hold true for every area of your organisation.
Granted it can be difficult converting new customers during the holiday period, with key decision makers away sunning themselves on foreign beaches.
But just like that week between Christmas and New Year, or when you pop into the office on a Saturday morning, this month offers welcome respite from the daily grind and a great opportunity for some calm reflection and planning.
So after a hard year’s creating, promoting and publicising, now is no time for the marketing team to put its feet up. Here are 5 ideas to keep you busy and if you need any more, please get in touch. Right, well, I can’t hang around blogging all day – I’m off on holiday this Friday and I haven’t packed a thing. Enjoy the summer break.
Update your website. Take some time to freshen up your site with a news story, a blog post or some new copy to bring your product pages up-to-date. If you don’t have a content management system (CMS) that allows you to easily update your site, speak to the IT Marketing Factory about creating one.
Plan your social networking. Do your company Facebook and Twitter accounts think your computer keyboard has broken? Then take some time to update your status. Better still, is it possible for you to pre-write some tweets and posts for the months to come? I know these things are supposed to be spontaneous but you might be glad of a few ideas up your sleeve in the busy weeks that follow the summer holidays.
Cleanse your data. A bit like tidying our rooms as teenagers, this job is one we put off as long as possible, all the time knowing it will make life so much easier in the long run.
Spend some time now categorising prospect and client information and target those marketing messages more effectively in the months to come.
Plan your marketing schedule. Make the most of this summer period to schedule all marketing activities for the coming year. Review your results to date, consider new strategies for the coming 12 month period, consult with new and existing suppliers and plan your budget.
Write your Christmas cards. This one may be a little tongue-in-cheek but there’s nothing like a bit of forward planning, is there? You could add a Christmas card field to your CRM system and start to prepare your list as part of the data cleansing exercise recommended above. At least this will make the task less stressful when you sit down to write your cards on the 24th December.
