8 Ways to Make Your Marketing Flourish This Summer
Summer is officially here. With warmer weather and longer nights come increased vacation time and out-of-office autoresponders. Exciting, right? However, with more people away from their desks, many marketing teams are understaffed and stretched for resources.
As we head into the summer season, how can marketing teams ensure that their summer vacations don’t sabotage their marketing goals?
First thing first, you deserve to unplug
When your corporate culture prioritizes your well-being on and off the clock like ours here at DemandLab, time off of any kind is encouraged and supported. Truly enjoying that time unplugged and guilt-free, though, requires proper planning and preparation.
Your campaigns and initiatives must go on. Your customers still expect excellent experiences. Your leadership team and stakeholders still expect to see results.
In this post, I’ll show you how to keep the marketing-led customer experience top of mind and focus on the three foundational elements of digital marketing success–martech, data, and content marketing. In each of the three areas, I’ll give you tips on where you can make small, noticeable changes with tremendous impact and where you tackle more strategic initiatives.
By getting your house in order before you’re off enjoying your uninterrupted vacation time, you’ll be on your way to reaching your goals by year’s end.
Make your martech work smarter, not harder
Today’s marketers are excelling with their martech. However, although you may have the basics in order, you’ll likely have gaps to fill that require a human touch during the summer slowdown.
Need help keeping your marketing campaigns running?
Develop program templates and shells that non-marketing team members can use to build and execute programs as needed. This is a best practice you should already have in place. If not, now is a great time to assemble your templates and develop training and how-to documentation for you, your team, and any external support teams.
Need help properly tracking leads through the funnel?
Invest time in reviewing your current lead lifecycle program for improvements or gaps. Once your marketing campaigns hook prospects, they must be adequately qualified, tracked, and pushed to the right team for action. You’ll also want accurate notifications, alerts, and reporting sent to your stakeholders.
Need help with something more complex like integrations, migrations, or custom syncs?
Find an agency partner specializing in the tools within your marketing and sales stack, like Marketo, Eloqua, Salesforce, or Uberflip, and can deliver personalized action plans based on your company’s needs and objections. For bonus points, ensure that this partner can support your team on an ongoing basis, even on those less-intensive initiatives above.
Prove the accuracy of your data
Poor data management practices can have a lasting impact on your marketing efforts. For example, they could limit your ability to engage customers and generate revenue. Or you may risk exposing your organization to devastating fines and reputational damage. Avoid these dangers at all costs by committing time to improve your data practices.
Need help cleaning your database?
Research a deduplication tool that integrates with your marketing automation or CRM platform. Going into Q3 and Q4 with a squeaky clean database will be a massive win for you and your team. A few tools we recommend to our enterprise clients using Marketo or Salesforce are RingLead, Cloudingo, and DemandTools.
Need to help with something more complex like consolidating and centralizing your data?
Find an agency partner with experience creating customer data platforms (CDPs) and systems that collect data from multiple systems, consolidate it in a central place, and disseminate it through your sales and marketing platforms to deliver new insights and drive deeper customer engagement.
If you cashed in on the bonus points above, you’ll likely have found an agency that can support you in this area along with your martech needs.
Capture your customers’ (limited) attention
Content marketing truly has the power to generate revenue when done right. Unfortunately, more often than not, marketers struggle to accomplish this. Between fully understanding their audience and finding time to develop a strategy and produce content, marketers may be leaving money on the table regarding content.
Need help creating content?
Spend time brainstorming content ideas and creating or filling up your content calendar to end the year. Then, assign topics to marketers and SMEs. Unfortunately, I know that this is not always possible given people’s busy schedules. Alternatively, you can outsource the entire process, from preparation and content creation to distribution and measurement.
Remember, your audience’s attention is waning during this time too. So you’ll want to carefully and creatively approach how you develop this content to engage them.
Need help developing strategic messaging that aligns with customer needs?
Content strategy is key here! Schedule some time to devote to those more intensive elements of content marketing like persona development, messaging, and theme development. These are the aspects that will take your content from good to great.
Need help proving that your content is working?
Go back to your agency partner (hint: the one you found earlier in this post) and work with them to implement attribution frameworks. With the right tools, you’ll be able to measure the impact of specific content assets, campaigns, and channels.
Refresh, recharge, but keep reaching those goals.
Summer vacations don’t have to slow the show. Limited resources don’t mean you have to risk losing out on opportunities to deliver the exceptional experiences that your customers and prospects expect. Find a balance between ensuring you and your people take quality time to refresh and recharge while maintaining the movement needed to reach your annual goals.
P.S. I have one more bonus tip for you. Whether you need help with everything from this post or just the strategic initiatives, I encourage you to find an agency partner that can integrate into your team and help you meet AND exceed your goals. Luckily, I can vouch for an agency like this!
If you want to learn more about working with an agency partner that can support a 50X volume of multilingual campaigns or help boost lead engagement 4X, let’s talk! A 30-minute call may be the only thing holding you back from flourishing.