For a number of industries summer represents a relatively slow period. If you sell to other businesses, it’s likely you’ll experience quieter than normal months through July and August, but that doesn’t mean you have to put your own marketing efforts on hold.
In fact, too many companies see the slow down as an excuse to stop writing and publishing new content and to wait for everyone to get back to work.
There’s just one problem – everyone else is doing the exact same thing. Instead of shutting down your marketing efforts for two months, let’s look at some of the tangential benefits of content marketing and how powering through the slower months of summer can actually help you get ahead.
Content Is Integral to SEO
One of the major reasons your website traffic decreases every summer is that overall volume is down. Rankings don’t drop, Google doesn’t penalize B2B businesses for seasonal slowdowns. There are just fewer people searching for those terms. With 69% of people on vacation for at least a week (half of them for 2 weeks or longer), it makes sense.
So why not move up in the rankings while everyone else is on vacation, so that when the volume goes back up in September and October, you’re sitting on top ready to take advantage of it?
Content is a major factor in driving SEO performance. More content on your site touching on key topics in your industry means more pages for Google to rank and better overall traffic for your website. By powering through the summer months and producing more content instead of less, you can take advantage of the fact that few other companies are as active.
Not Everyone Is On Vacation
It certainly feels like it, but in the United States, the majority of people are still in the office on any given day with nearly half deciding to stay home for their time off. Those people are even more bored than usual because so many of their coworkers, clients, and customers aren’t around.
Let’s take advantage of their procrastination and boredom and put some good content in front of them. Competition decreases this time of year, which means it will be that much easier for your content campaigns to take top billing on Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, and YouTube (or wherever else you publish).
More importantly, you can build real momentum during the summer months by publishing more frequently than you might during heavy business months.
Outreach Becomes Easier with Less Competition
One of the most effective forms of content marketing is outreach to influencers and thought leaders in your industry. Bloggers, video producers, and community managers who have a direct line to the people you are trying to reach can give you instant legitimacy through interviews, podcasts, guest content, or backlinking.
During the summer months, most people in these fields will keep publishing at full speed (because they know how important points 1 and 2 are above), but there are fewer people to feature or speak to for their content.
That’s where you come in. While there will certainly be some instances where you get slow or no responses at all (because of vacation time), there are others in which previously unreachable influencers are perfectly happy to respond to your queries.
This is especially true if you are in an industry that features a number of conferences through the summer, keeping these individuals active through the end of the vacation season.
Always Be Creating Content
Even if you go on vacation or half your team is out on any given week, don’t let that be an excuse for a content slowdown. Effective content strategy demands frequency and regular posting – something that becomes that much harder to maintain during summer months.
If you can keep up your posts, however, or even increase how often you post or publish, you can take advantage of the decrease in overall volume and boost your own efforts to the top of the list.
Eager to create more content faster? Click here or the button below to download my Blog Creation Checklist and speed up the process even more.
