3 Steps To surviving the summer in your marketing

The summer sun, the sand, the beach, life seems so great in the summer…until it isn’t. As a small business owner in the wedding and event industry, while the summer is relaxing for the rest of the world, it can feel really overwhelming. Depending on your region or area, summer can be very busy with weddings and events, or summer can be your off season when no events are happening except that it’s the time when you’re supposed to be getting caught up on all of your work. When you add in kids out of school, summer camps, off schedule, out of the routine, the pressure to take a vacation, not to mention looming fall weddings and events that are upcoming - summertime can be a recipe for burnout.

From photographers to wedding planners to florists and every creative business in between, here are three steps to surviving the marketing for your wedding or event business in the summer. Here’s how to bring in more business, inquiries from potential customers, and attract more of your idea clients even when your own personal schedule is out of whack and you’re trying to survive the summer and somehow manage to squeeze in a vacation and juggle kids home from school.

PRE-SCHEDULING IS YOUR FRIEND

When it comes to your marketing your business and trying to keep up in the summer time, do not try to be a hero and do all the things in real time. From social media posts, to content creation to blog posts and creating new galleries from all of this amazing work that you’ve been doing, you need to make a content plan and pre-schedule as much as you possibly can.

Summer is not the time to be active leaving comments and filming new videos, but you don’t have to go dark in your marketing either. Use social media schedulers and pre-scheduling tools within your marketing platforms to pre-schedule all of your content to post while you’re busy taking a break in the summer.

Unfortunately, when you’re constantly on the hook to bring in new business, you can’t afford to shut down your marketing efforts totally and completely in the summer. You can pre-schedule your marketing content so that you appear to be available and present, even when you are taking time to enjoy summer.

automation is also your friend

A close friend to pre-scheduling marketing content is automation. If you’re in the wedding or event business, you need to automate as much as you can in the summer time. I’m not talking about out-of-office email responses and using AI to write your blogs, both of those things are great and helpful tools, but they still requires some level of your involvement at some point. I’m talking about thinking creatively and implementing automation within your marketing and client inquiry process so that the work is automatically done for you and you don’t have to come back and do it when summer is over.

Where can you use automation tools within your email platforms to do the responding for you? Can you make a personal video from you so that when people inquire they automatically get a video from you talking them through the next steps? How can you automatically get clients the information that they need to move the inquiry and process along while you’re in summer-mode? Who knows, you might like the automation so much that you keep it going all year long.

If potential clients have to wait weeks or months until summer is over to get a response from you with pricing information or basic information, they’ve likely moved onto your competitors by then.

trust your old content

If you’ve been in business for more than a little bit, you likely have old content that’s doing the bulk of the work for your marketing. If it is an old blog post or a Pinterest pin from several years ago, that old piece of content is probably bringing the majority of the traffic to your website and your contact form. When times are busy like in the summer, it’s worth your effort to make sure that the legacy content is the best reflection of your business right now, as it stands today.

Instead of working on creating new content in the summer, work on cleaning up the old content so your contact information is easy to find and the photos are updated. You can update and change everything on your legacy content (except for the link!) so that when people to come to your website during the summer, you want them best of you right now, not some old, outdated version.

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I hope these tips for surviving the summer with the marketing of your wedding or event business were helpful. As for me? I’m off to the beach to enjoy my summer vacation!

If you’re a creative small business serving the wedding and event industry - such as a wedding planner, photographer, entertainer, DJ, rental company, florist, invitation designer and more - and you need help with your online marketing, content creation, or your Pinterest account, please send me an email at info@juliannesmith.com or check out my done-for-you and training services for wedding pros. I’d love to work with you to maximize your creativity and the overwhelm and work with the clients that you want to work with!

For more tips and advice on the wedding industry, be sure to check out past blog posts and sign up for my weekly emails where I’ll send you all kinds of wedding business education nuggets in 100 words or less!