Summer is right around the corner. With changes in the weather come more opportunities to give your marketing strategy a boost and use a seasonal hook to promote your business. This summer, try something new — like hosting a seasonal pop-up shop, for example.
Seasonal campaigns are a good way to keep your customers engaged in the year’s hottest months. Need inspiration? Try a few of these marketing tactics:
Hit the holidays.
Fourth of July, Labor Day, Back to School — these are all perfect occasions to promote your business. Try email marketing to quickly and easily send customers themed email for any sale, promotion, or event you’re doing around these holidays. If you’re not sure where to start, use an email marketing template.
Follow the weather (and local happenings).
Be on the lookout for opportunities to leverage what’s going on locally to promote your business. Social media and sidewalk signage work particularly well for this. This would be another good opportunity for an email campaign to help you quickly capitalize on extra-hot days. (“It’s going to be 90 today — 2 for 1 ice cream cones!”)
Get out there.
Warmer weather means outdoor events. If you’re a brick-and-mortar store, try looking for ways you can participate in things like street fairs, block parties, or festivals. Pop-ups are also a great idea this time of year, especially in places where people will be in the mood for your goods (think ice cream at the beach or green juices after a yoga-in-the-park event). To promote where you’ll be posting up, shout it out via your social channels.
Host an event.
School’s out for summer, which means people have more time to hang. So why not throw an event to get your customers together? If you’re a flower shop, you might host a summer flower arrangement class. If you’re a fitness professional, get your clients together for a beach boot camp.
When promoting your event, one thing to consider is just targeting your regular customers with the invitation to show them some love. Square Customer Engagement makes this easy by automatically segmenting your customer lists into loyal, casual, or lapsed. Bringing your regulars together helps foster a sense of community around your business (always a good thing).
Offer summer gift cards.
Especially if you have summer sales spikes, gift cards are a great way to bring in even more customers. You can even design custom Square gift cards to fit a summer theme. For inspiration, take a look at how some Square sellers have incorporated their branding into their gift card offerings.
Sales, sales, sales.
People will be on the lookout for hot sales as holidays like the Fourth of July and Labor Day roll around. So make sure to keep your business top of mind. It’s a good idea to discount items that would be particularly relevant for each holiday. For Fourth of July, for example, run promotions for party items — things like BBQ supplies, red-white-and-blue decorations, and (legal) fireworks. Labor Day tends to be the time people get back to business (and back to school), so make sure to promote items related to that theme.
