Marketing Planning
By Cheryl Salazar, The Partner Marketing Group
You may be sitting in your office just counting the days until you go fishing for the summer and the last thing on your mind is marketing planning for the Fall. With the kids are almost out of school, the days are longer, the weather is brighter and you’re just raring to go. After all, your customers are out of town, your prospects have gone fishing too …
What happens comes September? Do you have to hit the restart button, get your marketing groove back on, and get some momentum going because you have business to close, customers to talk to, and next year’s fishing trip to budget for?
The summer hiatus is the perfect time to do the “grunt work” of marketing. While others have gone fishing, the business keeps going but things are probably a lot quieter. This is the perfect time to clean house in preparation for Back to Work after Labor Day. You can…
Marketing Planning: Things to do in Summer
- Acquire new marketing lists. Clean them up, de-dupe them, add contact names via LinkedIn to the records so you’ve got a good focused list to market to in August, September and beyond.
- Review your website –refresh a page a day and make short work of this task.
- Attend a webcast – a perfect way to get some low cost training. Look for archived webcasts on marketing best practices to polish your skills.
- Optimize your SEO (search engine optimization) – have a look at those Google Analytics reports that always seem to fill your inbox and pay close attention to them. Do your keywords still rank, are they relevant? Call a couple of customers and ask what terms they search on to ensure that your content is still relevant to their searches.
- Read some industry reports – are you still on top of your game with your messaging? Do you know what keeps CEOs, CFOs and CIOs up at night?
- Write up topics for blog posts – put them in a calendar, assign people’s names to them and you’ve got your plan laid out for the next 6 months.
- Do the same for your social media posts and your event calendar by lining up your webcasts, posting the descriptions, and putting them up on your website where prospects can see them.
Take Advantage of Down Time
By taking advantage of some downtime, you can organize your marketing plan and tactics for the next 6 months. Once you start fishing again you can take time off to Go Fishing. We hope you catch the ‘Big One’ and have stories to tell for years to come.
And, if you have Gone Fishing, we have your back. With our Summer of Four promotion, you can stay on track. You can have One case study, a refresh of Two website pages, Three e-newsletters issues, and Four optimized blog posts … all written and ready to go from The Partner Marketing Group when you come back.
Stay tuned, for our Partridge in a Pear Tree promotion this holiday season … you know once you get back from your fishing trip it won’t be long before that happens!
