Putting a Spring in your Marketing Step
With a changing season comes new marketing opportunities. Are you ready to make the most of them? In this article I’m sharing a few of my favourite pointers to think about when planning fresh activity:
The first thing to do is sit down with a calendar and mark off any dates that are relevant for your business and you want to plan some activity around, even if it’s just a social media post. There’s actually a lot of different events in March through to May — as well as the more obvious ones, think about if you could do something to mark the start of Summer Time, something fun for April Fool’s day, or something Earth Day. There’s lot’s of bank holiday’s too, which brings us to our second point…
Bear in mind that it’s not just the season that’s changing — your customers’ behaviours will often be changing too. Day’s are longer, which can naturally have the effect of lengthening working hours or household chores, meaning for example, that if you usually target marketing activities for 6pm in the winter, you may want to give 7pm a try instead. People are also more likely to be out and about at weekends in the spring and summer, rather than at home scrolling through their phones, so do you need to make any adjustments to be sure you’re still reaching and appealing to them?
There’s also lot’s of bank holidays in the spring, especially May this year, so how you can you work that into your marketing strategy? If your marketing is business to business and you normally post to social media or send out a newsletter on a Monday, would it be better to shift it to the Tuesday that week instead? If you’re business to customer then what might be useful for them to know or have from you ahead of that extra time off? Can you offer them something that they can enjoy on those days? Figuring out what’s on the minds of your customers and tailoring your marketing accordingly is a really helpful technique.
The other thing to be aware of is, if you are planning some special activity around any particular events, make sure your website or booking system is ready for action. A great social media campaign that sends lots of traffic to your website isn’t much use if when people get there they leave again without doing anything. Whether you want them to buy a product, make a booking, sign up to your mailing list or send you an email, make it easy for them to do so as possible, with clear and up to date information on what to do and persuasive text, images and design that will propel viewers to take that next step rather than putting them off.
Speaking of images (well, writing about them), spring is an excellent season to refresh your website, blog and social media photos. We are all ready to see bright and sunny pictures, we want to imagine ourselves doing activities on beautiful days with clear blue skies, and we love seeing the spring flowers and new greenery. New photos can capture this mood of revitalisation and refresh our marketing, giving it some extra energy and momentum.
One more thing! If mid-to-late spring is when things usually start getting busier for you, then March is a good time to review all your marketing materials and make sure they are up to date (if you haven’t done it already). We shared a few easily forgotten things to check in our February newsletter — do sign up if you enjoy these articles — but a few other things to think about are getting new blog posts written and ready for your website, preparing newsletter content for all those new sign ups you’re going to have and checking that any updated opening hours or upcoming events are easily discoverable on your social media pages.
We hope this article helps you to have a great spring of marketing activity. If you’d like to have a chat about more specific ideas for your own business, want someone to take a look at your website booking page, would like to art building your mailing list or need new seasonal photography for your website, blog and social media, we can help with all of that! Just get in touch.