Summer B2B marketing seems a questionable investment for many companies, as the whole season is perceived to be one of the slowest periods of the year. Although the reality behind this perception is understandable, is there a compelling enough reason to slow down your marketing efforts? This article discusses how B2B marketers can effectively leverage this period.
Here are two useful approaches:
Be Dominant in a Slow Market
During the summer, many B2B companies choose to scale back their marketing budgets. Paradoxically, according to figures released recently by LinkedIn, the engagement rate with ads on the platform rises by about 10% during the summer season.
Therefore, the good news for those who plan to stay active with their marketing efforts during the summer is that your B2B campaigns will enjoy more visibility due to reduced competition, higher engagement rates, and more favourable costs (less competition = lower bidding). Ultimately, this translates into a greater impact for your campaigns, while ensuring that your brand stays top of mind within your target audience.
Higher engagement rates and lower marketing costs during summer (LinkedIn)
How is this fact beneficial for B2B companies?
- Building brand awareness: Utilize top-of-the-funnel content to establish brand awareness during the slower season, and ensure that your brand remains prominent when your target audience is ready to make purchase decisions. Concentrate on delivering informative and educational content rather than focusing solely on conversions. By making awareness your primary goal, you can considerably increase the number of prospective clients, turning into higher sales ultimately.
- Offering purchase incentives to customers and prospects: This can be a powerful strategy to stand out during a seasonal market slowdown. Offering limited-time sales promotions and discounts, particularly to those you are already engaged with, can create a sense of urgency and incentivize immediate action. This will result in the signing of contracts that might otherwise have been postponed until the end of summer. The above-mentioned approach can help fast-track business opportunities and maintain momentum even during the slower season.
- Remarketing: Remarketing and retargeting B2B campaigns can be highly effective during summer. These strategies involve targeting users who have already shown interest in your products or services in the past. By displaying retargeted ads to prospects or nurturing them, you can move them further along the buyer’s journey and have them reach a sales-ready status faster.
- Ensuring customer satisfaction and loyalty: Marketers traditionally focus on driving new sales. However, one of the essential functions of marketing is to ensure customer satisfaction and retention. If your B2B sales activity slows down during the summer, redirecting efforts toward existing customers can be an effective avenue. Engaging in open discussions and conducting surveys can help you discover methods to keep your existing clients for a longer duration. If they are already happy, it is time to collect testimonials and explore opportunities for upselling (i.e., offer a higher-end solution) and/or cross-selling (i.e., provide a complementary solution to the one they already use). Genuinely caring about their satisfaction and actively striving toward addressing their needs fosters your customers’ loyalty, enhances your reputation in the market, and increases recurring sales.
Typical Annual B2B Marketing Activity Pattern
Prepare for the Rise (During the Fall Season)
The reduced pace of work during the summer can provide an excellent chance to finally tackle those tasks that are often delayed due to other priorities or time constraints. By dedicating time and attention, you can guarantee remarkable results during the fall.
Here are a few examples to set yourself up for success:
- Investing in SEO: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has a direct impact on your company’s reputation, visibility, and growth. Summer provides an ideal opportunity to conduct an SEO audit. For example, those pages that are not appearing on the search engine results page can be enhanced to rank, and those pages that are underperforming in the ranking can be tweaked to perform better. If the overall authority of your website is not as strong as you expect it, we recommend fixing it. All these improvements may take a few weeks to over 2 months to bear results, as it is up to Google to decide whether your website’s rankings should change or not. Getting backlinks from reputable and relevant sources can also be very time-consuming, but it is worth the time and effort. Addressing these issues early in the summer can increase your chances of climbing up the search engine results ladder just in time for the coming season.
- Database Cleanup: Prospective clients’ database cleanup is another essential task that is often overlooked. Outdated or incorrect data can lead to wasted marketing resources, campaign failures, and poor decision-making. By reviewing and tidying up your database during this period, you can ensure the data is accurate and aligned with your strategy. This will enable you to target your audience more precisely and achieve a higher level of effectiveness in your marketing campaigns overall.
- Website Maintenance: Summer maintenance will allow you to uncover and fix issues such as broken links, slow-loading pages, or outdated information, all of which can negatively impact your website’s visitor experience. Bear in mind that even in terms of SEO, search engines favour websites that are regularly updated, technically maintained, and deliver a positive user experience. By offering a seamless and user-friendly experience, you can engage with and retain your visitors, increase their time on-site, and ultimately improve your conversion rate.
- Content Analysis, Planning, and Development: Similarly, it may be a good idea to take this opportunity to evaluate the content that you have already generated and see how you can incorporate new blogs, videos, podcasts, webinars, articles, infographics, and other content pieces into your summer B2B marketing campaigns. It is also a great practice to map your content and identify the type of content you lack at different phases of your sales funnel. It is also critical to revise the existing content in terms of its alignment with industry trends and customer needs. This proactive approach helps you plan and develop a constant content flow throughout the year.
- Automation, Automation, and Automation: Summertime can also be the best time of the year to step up your game in terms of automation. In an age when AI (Artificial intelligence) is playing a major role in our lives, assisting us in our everyday tasks, it is crucial to take the time and explore how you can use these sophisticated tools to make your day-to-day processes faster and more efficient. Marketing automation also enables you to maintain consistent and timely communication with your audience, even when resources are limited, or team members are on vacation. You can even set up automated campaigns in advance to make sure your marketing messages reach your target audience without interruption.
- Business Model and Marketing Strategy Re-Assessment: While it can be challenging to look at events clearly during the chaotic and busy seasons, summer provides a great opportunity to step back, reflect, and take a complete and honest look at your marketing strategy and business model as a whole. It can be the perfect time to assess your past successes and failures, identify strengths and weaknesses, and better understand what works and what needs improvement. Indulging in this process will allow you to make better-informed decisions while identifying new opportunities for the rest of the year.
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Final Words
To recap, summer provides a remarkable chance to expand market share, enhance existing processes and assets, address weaknesses, and foster innovation and creativity toward the fall season in the B2B marketing realm.
You can make the most of this season by dedicating time to reflection, planning, collaboration, and implementation.
So, embrace the summer B2B marketing opportunities and position your business for growth and greater achievements in your industry.
