Summertime, and the living is easy. However, it might not be so rose-colored for your small business’ audience engagement. With weekend trips and planned vacations (or staycations), consumers are less likely to respond to your email marketing campaigns, special offers, or any other marketing material your business produces. If you follow these tips to the tee, your brand can use this lull in engagement to make its content strategy airtight for the impending fall months.

No. 1: Evaluate your content strategy for what can be improved. Instead of dragging your feet through the dog days of summer, your team ought to look at the current content strategy in place for your small business. The more perspectives (marketing, sales, account services, etc.) that can collaborate, the better. Everyone involved should be on the lookout for anything that is currently lacking from your brand’s approach. What kind of content have you not dabbled with or created yet? Which questions from your target audience(s) still need to be answered? What content triggers need to be confronted? Your team will also want to dig through previous content to locate evergreen material, as well as content that received the most engagement from followers and consumers. Fixing any broken links within yesteryear’s content will also help sharpen your business’ SEO.

No. 2: Create a content editorial calendar. In order to better organize your content strategy, you will need to plan ahead. Use the sluggish summer to your advantage by mapping out the topics and innovative ideas you want to tackle further down the road. The best way to do this is through a content marketing software or project management program. Here at the NALA, we use Trello to outline content ideas and share across teams. Things you ought to include in your content strategy calendar include: due dates and deadlines, topics and themes, as well as research. By streamlining the workflow of your strategy, it will become easier for your to team to produce and improve content over a long period of time.

No. 3: Identify ways to generate new leads within your content strategy. Come September, your target consumers will return to their budgets and regular spending habits. Summer is the perfect time to brainstorm and research tactics that appeal to your market(s) and position yourself as an industry expert. Pinpoint the media your target audience is consuming and consider jump-starting a local press campaign that will build the foundation for a good reputation. Alternatively, consider launching an email marketing campaign that includes gated content in order to bring more leads into your funnel. Regardless of your business’ methods, it will be imperative for your team to revisit and refine its marketing message(s) and outreach with the extra time summer temporarily promises.