Are you and your content strategy in shape for summer?
Let’s be honest—I’m not and my gym knows it!
Or more importantly, my health club knows a thing or two about summer content marketing based on past registration and usage results.
Specifically, they know their target audience wants to look buff in their more body-revealing summer clothes and bathing suits. Their prospects are in-market for health club memberships.
Whatever your business focus, you need to get your content marketing in shape for summer to ensure that it looks up-to-date and relevant regardless of the context in which it’s found and viewed.
Don’t worry—we’ve got you covered with these summer content marketing tips.
Fill Your Summer Calendar: 5 Core Content Types
How to use the 5 core content types for your summer content marketing strategy. (Chart)
Before we dive into the 5 summer content marketing tips, let’s why you need to adapt your content and marketing strategies for the summer.
The main reason:
Your audience’s needs change during the summer. While it may be a busy season for your business, your readers and customers are energized by the warm weather and have different personal objectives.
For your content marketing to remain relevant and contextual appealing, adapt it to meet your audience’s needs and attention-focus.
Select summer topics and themes based on the words and information your audience actively seeks at this time of year for summer content strategy success.
Fill your summer content editorial calendar with the 5 core content types:
- Add Summer Foundational Content. Includes summer original research or a summer refresh where appropriate.
- Targeted Summer Customer Information or FAQ Needs. Depending on your business include information such as recipes, home care, family vacations, sports and beach time.
- Include Summer Information In Your Cyclical Content. This is particularly good for local summer activities that exist within your community or product category. For example, New York City hosts Fleet Week and Fourth of July fireworks.
- Give Summer Crowd Pleaser Content A Fun Theme. Take advantage of summer activities like movies, music and beaches.
- Update Summer Evergreen and Holiday Long Playing Content. Include holidays like Memorial Day, Father’s Day, Graduation, Independence Day, and Labor Day. Don’t forget the fun events related to your core products!
5 Ways To Get Your Content Strategy Summer Ready
Here are 5 ways to get your content marketing strategy summer ready so that it shines.
1. Inventory existing summer content marketing
Audit summer related content. Specifically assess your existing content from last summer. Include big rock content, blog posts, customer communications (online and offline), internal content information and social media content.
Consider existing content in light of current content marketing and business goals, updated audience needs (aka: marketing persona) and content context.
Key Summer Content Marketing Question To Ask: How does this content fit with my company’s needs, brand, formats and language?
Summer Content Marketing Tips:
- Check last year’s editorial and social media calendars including content marketing metrics. This provides insights into what worked and what didn’t. While you’re doing this, assess your headlines, media format and presentation.
- Add metadata to existing content. This streamlines your content audit process, since you’ll easily be able to select your summer-relevant content.
- Decide which content needs to be spruced up for summer. Use a spreadsheet or other program for tracking.
- Highlight where you have gaps in your summer content. When you examine your content as a whole, it’s easier to determine where you’re missing elements and what they are. Add them to your content creation list.
2. Create summer content marketing editorial calendar
Review your annual content plan and editorial calendar for new opportunities.
If you don’t have these 2 content marketing planning tools in place—Don’t worry! Follow these steps to get your summer content marketing calendar ready for prime time.
Take advantage of summer’s sense of energy and upbeat outlook to you refine your content marketing plans.
PRO CONTENT MARKETING TIP: Leave room in your calendar for notes. Outside factors beyond your control always happen. Document them to improve your content marketing going forward. Take my word for it—no one remembers why a piece of content or campaign yielded low results due to vacations or servers going down.
Summer Content Marketing Tips:
- Cover major holidays and events related to your business, brand and offering.
- Add summer themes to your cyclical content. This includes recurring content columns. The objective is to show that you’re in touch with your audience and what’s happening.
- Get input from employees and customers. Don’t go it alone. Find out what interests others in your business and products during the summer.
3. Select summer content marketing elements: Think visual
Focus on the look and feel of your content marketing to make it look fresh and attract attention. This is particularly important for visual content especially to make your content marketing more social sharing friendly.
Pick a few visual symbols related to your brand and content to make it feel of the moment. Where possible give your brand colors a summer brightness.
One easy way to accomplish this is to tap into Pantone’s seasonal colors. (BTW—Michael Brenner also recommends doing this!)
Remember: Even evergreen content can benefit from a makeover. In turn, this gives each piece of content another round of engagement.
Summer Content Marketing Tips:
- Determine a few key visual themes and integrate them into your content. Create a few summer templates to spiff up existing content to minimize work and costs. Be like Peg Fitzpatrick and batch your content summerization to save time.
- Make summer visuals easy-to-implement. The more you streamline the process, the easier it is to change.
- Keep track of the content you spruce up for summer. While tracking may seem time consuming, it’ll give you a change list for other seasons!
4. Create and modify summer content marketing
Based on your summer content audit and editorial calendar, develop your summer-themed content marketing.
Need summer content idea inspiration? Use 50 summer titles like a set of MadLibs!
Summer Content Marketing Tips:
- Allocate budget and resources to update content for summer.
- Re-imagine existing summer content that needs an updated look. Think of it as filling in your existing wardrobe. Here’s how to enhance existing content marketing.
- Develop summer versions of core content. At a minimum, dress it differently using summer visuals.
- Curate relevant summer content. Remember that you don’t have to do it all yourself! Here’s the solopreneur’s guide to content curation.
5. Amplify, distribute and re-promote summer content marketing
Like a summer road trip, use the summer season to get the most mileage out of your content marketing.
Don’t forget to optimize your content across your 5 key audiences: customers, social media, search, influencers and your business.
Optimize Content for 5 Audiences
Before blasting out your summer content marketing, assess which segments of your audience need and want this content most.
Since summer is playtime make sure to engage with sales and customer service to maximize your content reach and use. This reduces extra or duplicate content efforts and increases content marketing effectiveness cost effectively.
Summer Content Marketing Tips:
Summer Content Marketing Tips Conclusion
Like your gym, you need to get your content marketing in shape for summer. Use these summer content marketing tips to instill it with summer’s bright light. It gives us power and energy.
To keep your content marketing visible and relevant, ensure that this summer content marketing strategy effort isn’t a once and done exercise. Document your actions.
Then track it going forward. Not only will it help you this season but also it’ll save you time next summer.
Even if you don’t have an annual content plan or editorial calendar yet, use these 5 summer content marketing steps to get your content on track to succeed for this summer and beyond.
It’s summer—have fun with your content marketing and brighten your audience’s reading.
Happy Marketing,
Heidi Cohen
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on May 22, 2015. It has been extensively revised for this year’s summer fun.
Photo Credit: https://www.pexels.com/photo/women-s-assorted-sports-bras-raising-their-pink-dumbbells-864990/ cc zero by Bruce Mars