Summary: Summer can be a booming season for small businesses, with tourists in town and crowds enjoying the sun. To capitalize on this potential revenue boom, shake up your marketing strategies with some summer themes in mind. Have fun and embrace the sunny mood of the season, but don’t try to reinvent the wheel completely and throw out tried and true strategies that work for your business.
As the summer season comes into full swing, small business owners all around the country have one question on their minds: what’s the best way to capitalize on the spirit of the season, and boost those profits in the summer months? With higher tourism rates, lots of young customers on vacation with school’s out of session, and hot weather leading to hot buying streaks in lots of markets, summer can be a peak time for small business income. But what exactly should your small business do to maximize income during the summer, and make sure profits heat up with the weather? Start with the right marketing and promotion strategy, and the rest will fall into place. Here are our top 5 summer marketing tips to help boost small business revenue during the hottest months of the year:
1. Re-think Social
For most of the year, advertising on Social Media is a no-brainer for small business owners. But as summer comes into full effect, more and more of your potential customers will be ditching their computer screens and spending their time in the summer sun. Pay close attention to how effective your social media marketing campaigns seem to be as summer comes into full swing, and adjust your spending on social media marketing accordingly. If your customer base is primarily young and local, social media marketing can still be a great choice for your marketing needs, but spending on social media marketing campaigns shouldn’t be as automatic during the summer months.
2. Decorate Your Website
Everyone loves to add seasonal graphics, banners, and decorations to their websites during the winter holidays, but far fewer take the opportunity to get in the seasons and decorate their site when the summer season rolls around. Think of some fun and locally appropriate themed decorations you could tack on to your usual graphic schemes for the summer, and any visitors that happen upon your website will be impacted by your fun loving spirit. Feel free to relate decorative banners and badges to your products whenever possible, or just have fun with general and recognizable summer touches like beach patterns and palm trees. A touch of sunshine goes a long way!
3. Hit the Festival Circuit
No matter where you live, the summer season brings people outdoors, and local fairs and festivals can be a great place to do some marketing for your small business on a person to person level. Visitors to fairs and festivals are usually already planning on spending money, so if your small business has a product that can be easily vended out in the festival atmosphere, capitalize on the opportunity to make some direct profits. But even if you aren’t selling anything, hit-up your local festivals and fairs to spread the word about your business by handing out flyers, talking to potential customers one on one, and taking advantage of the positive festival atmosphere to have a positive impact on potential customers.
4. Think of Some Summer Specific Freebies
With the heat and sun of summer changing just about everything about the ways that people spend their time, there are lots of fun opportunities in summertime to think of fun and creative freebies to hand out to market your small business. If you can, think of small and fun things directly related to your business that you can pass out to tourists and new visitors to catch their attention, or incorporate some summer decorated take aways to excite your regular diners. But if your small business doesn’t have any products that you can easily and affordably turn into take-aways or freebies, don’t stress. Opt for anything summer themed, like Popsicle or squirt guns, that you can attach your branding to and bass off as a promotional freebie to the summer crowds.
5. Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
Year round, you probably have some strategies in place to market your small business that work for your customer base and niche. If you don’t there are a lot of resources out there for you to find tried and trued techniques for small business marketing, and test out what works for you. When summer hits, you can and should experiment with all of the things we mentioned above, keeping the summer season’s sunny fun mood in mind. But don’t try to reinvent the wheel completely. Don’t throw out the marketing techniques that work just because the seasons have changed.
