Here’s some tips on summer season marketing essentials to make sure your business is ready to embrace the annual tourism boom…
Planning: Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that the summer will be busy anyway and that you don’t need to think about marketing at this time of year. Instead think of marketing during the busy season as connecting and engaging with your customers at a time when they love you the most.
Forward plan not only your offers and interesting activity during the season, but make customers aware of the things you’ll have going on during the quieter times of year that they may be interested in. In order to do that you’ll have to think ahead to those less busy times now – so get your thinking caps on about ways in which you can effectively market your business from autumn onwards to the people standing in front of you.
Customer satisfaction: We’ve helped clients put together customer satisfaction surveys as it’s vital to find out what customers like about your business, what they don’t like and how you can improve. The best bit is by giving you their opinion you also have a way to contact them again in the future as you’ll more than likely include some sort of data capture information (see below).
Ensuring your customer satisfaction is high will no doubt lead to improved business, but it’s also a good excuse to get back in touch if you’ve actively done something to improve something with your business. That alone might give someone the incentive they need to visit you again.
Data capture: Spend some time thinking of ways that you can capture your visitor’s personal information. You’ll need it if you want to get back in touch with them or market to them at a later point. This can be anything from a small postcard that customers can fill in, to feedback forms, a pop up on your website, perhaps even a competition.
Ideally you’d like an email address and postal address as those are perhaps the easiest ways to market to someone after they’ve left your place of business. A telephone number is also useful and if you can get them to engage with you on social media (see below) even better. Email marketing is an especially useful tool and a great way of regularly keeping previous customers up to date with your news, views and offers.
Of course make sure your data collection is GDPR proof (General Data Protection Regulations). If you’re not sure what that is, read this article.
Social media: Are you doing all you can to encourage people who interact with your business to follow you on social media? Make sure your printed materials, including everything you physically display has social media icons encouraging people to follow or like your business. One of the best ways to keep talking, engaging and interacting with past customers is through the use of social media, so make sure they know where and how to find you.
If you have social media pages, try to ensure you’re increasing the amount of time you’re online during your busy season. You might not feel you need to as you’re busy anyway, but this is a great time of year to grab and hold a customer’s attention. After they’ve gone use social media to keep in their conscious thought and think of ways to encourage repeat business, bringing them back to you with offers, incentives and interesting information.
Trends: Tapping into a current trend is a great way of jumping on a bandwagon of popularity. It goes with saying that the television series Poldark attracts a great deal of attention. Is there a way that your business can use the ‘Poldark effect’?
Cornwall’s location is a brilliant asset, think of the things that make Cornwall so special and unique and tap into that for your own benefit. A great many businesses down here translate their websites in German due to the appeal of actress Rosamund Pike – what could you do?
Partnerships: Could you work with any partners or similar businesses to help promote your own business? At this time of year your competitors could also be your allies if you can think of a way to work together – it’ll give you a louder voice. Perhaps you could share promotional material in each other’s shops, restaurants, websites etc?
Piece of Cake can help with any or all of these things, as well as a whole host of other initiatives to make the most of your summer marketing. Give us a call for a chat to discuss or drop us an email…
Piece of Cake Communications 