Unlike winter, which can have some business stagnation, summer is a season where consumers are out and about, and ready to shop. This phenomenon gives entrepreneurs a brilliant opportunity to boost the performance of their corporation during the hottest months, especially for summer seasonal benefits.

 

Whether you sell toys or provide cleaning services, you can’t use a more effective communication channel with your target audience than content marketing. Such creative marketing ideas as vivid announcements, dynamic videos, company updates on the blog, and exciting descriptions of your products are the direct way to catch buyer’s attention. 

 

Here are the top 10 content marketing techniques you should try this summer to close as many hot deals as possible.

 

1. Make your posts actionable.

Motivate the users to interact with your content. To do this, introduce the possibility to like and share the materials, subscribe to groups in social networks or receive an email newsletter, and write reviews and leave comments. In exchange for their marketing boost, you can provide customers a lucrative offer. 

 

Such organic actions will increase the loyalty of your visitors, increase your subscriber base and your community in social networks. In addition, you’ll scale up your engagement rates and your pages will generate positive SEO signals. The main advantage you’ll get is an expanded network of potential buyers or clients. 

 

The examples of such marketing tactics include: “Get a $10 discount for your next purchase by sharing this post with your friends,” or “Subscribe to our newsletter and get our branded cap free.”

 

2. Publish interviews with industry leaders.

Influencer marketing is the leading trend in 2019, which gives mutual benefits for all parties. For every $1 spent on promotion via this channel, businesses are making $5.20 in earned media value. You get involvement from readers of opinion leaders while they continue strengthening their authority. 

 

By conducting an interview with a respectable person in your niche, you can produce really useful and veracious content for your audience with minimal effort. The influencer will do the greatest part of your creative marketing ideas on his or her own. 

 

You can discuss not only themes related to your business area. The personal stories also will kindle the interest of readers since people love to learn how great figures act in real life, what they usually do, and the secrets of their success. For example, you can ask them about their summer plans or get advice on where to spend the holiday. 

 

What’s more, it’s not necessary to organize a full interview session with a famous person to engage your users. A small paragraph in the article where you present the opinion of an influencer on some issue or event can be enough.

3. Create an exclusive story for a popular industry blog.

If you produce unique content, especially that reveals the latest research, many resources will want to publish it. You can contact a guest blog, a media page or a personal website of an influencer to find out upcoming topics for publication in their editorial calendar.

 

In case you want to decide on actual topics yourself, keep your finger on the pulse of changes in your sphere. For convenience, you can set Google alerts with relevant keywords, e.g, if you sell cars, set “automotive news.” There is nothing more enticing for journalists than an overview of some sensational event, thus, you can expect a hot market for your exclusive piece.

 

Don’t forget to link to other external resources when writing material to make your text deep, based on statistics, facts and reputable opinions. The more unique, reliable and interesting your content is, the more likely the corresponding resource will publish it and link to you.

4. Build a descriptive writing strategy. 

Chaotic posts without following any content marketing techniques are doomed to failure. Nowadays, businesses should make only smart promotional decisions to save their money and speed up results. For this, pay attention to the fundamental part of your content marketing initiatives: a comprehensive writing strategy. It will help you determine your target group, find a unique style of writing and encourage users.

 

One of the most effective creative marketing ideas for your writing strategy this summer is the prevalence of a descriptive type of writing. This technique allows writers to make the texts more expressive, exciting, and, most importantly, brightly present boring product or services descriptions. By using a lot of descriptive language, you give readers a chance to visualize even the abstract concepts and assess all properties of the goods. 

 

Just look at how skillfully Apple applied the descriptive style:

 

5. Convert materials to different formats.

The good news is that you don’t need to spend a lot of time to come up with a content plan for various marketing channels. You can do it at once with only one material ready. How about converting the article from your blog in the video format and then publishing it on your YouTube profile? Or visualizing the long list of items in the form of infographics? Also, you can publish the part of your new article on LinkedIn Pulse with a link to the original post. Other channels are likely to have a different audience, so why not to kill two birds with one stone?

 

The hint is that you can prepare one text, publish its original version on your blog, and then adapt it to other resources where it’s relevant. Brian Dean, a founder of Backlinko, is a real master of this technique. He converts almost all of his blog posts into YouTube videos and the result looks amazing. By the way, Brian himself promotes the idea of producing universal content in his educational materials.

6. Cover social networks with your content.

Monitor the newsfeed, groups, and communities in social networks, and search for questions about your type of product or service. When someone has a question that you can answer with your article, feel free to share your competent opinion and reinforce the reply with a link to the source. However, make sure that your response doesn’t look like a promotional post and meets all site policies.

 

You can set up notifications about new questions by using services that crawl social channels and forums.

7. Upgrade and republish the content that showed the best results.

Use repost indicators from BuzzSumo or other data, such as page views or conversions to define your best content. It’s your goldmine that can bring you much more profit if you continue maintaining its quality. What’s more, the search robots will also appreciate this contribution and chances are you’ll reach the top 10 positions.

 

It’s a nice plan to conduct a content analysis at the end of every quarter or month and slightly upgrade your best pages. For this, you can use Google Analytics or Ahrefs with its brilliant “Top Pages” feature. Just type in your domain and see what pages on your website have attracted the biggest traffic ever.

 

Go through every line of the best articles once again to see what points can be improved or corrected. Double check the presented statistics and numbers to make sure that they are still valid and match the results of the latest research. If possible, associate updates with the summer season.

8. Keep up with summer events.

Find conferences relevant to your niche that will be held this summer and save their hashtags. The first thing you should do is to write a blog post presenting this list of upcoming events. Secondly, generate useful content specifically for the people who are going to attend them. For example, form a list of hotels, routes, traditions, etc. Finally, during the event, share your materials with the community by subscribing to the hashtag. 

 

Also, we recommend you to implement this creative marketing idea: check the agenda of the planned conferences and create the pieces for your blog based on the speakers’ topics. People are ready to pay for these insights so make sure that you provided a free source of such valuable information.

9. Use bright elements to evoke positive associations.

How to attract the attention of users who dream of a vacation, the sea, and the beach? Try to evoke these hot associations and reflect the lightheartedness of summer in your text and design. 

 

Circle your content around entertainment. For example, realize these interactive content marketing techniques: insert a rebus, give relaxation tips, draw a comic or tell a summer story. Promote tips, products or services that will accompany people’s downtime or vacations.

 

10. Adapt content to mobile phones.

Keep in mind that in the summer, the number of users visiting sites from smartphones increases. That’s why you should take care of your mobile content optimization. Check how it’s displayed on all devices and fix the flaws. 

 

Also remember that while on vacation, visitors might have a low Internet connection so your pages should load even faster than usual. For this, optimize image sizes and don’t overfill the texts with GIFs, especially when it comes to the emails.

The Best Time to Act

For the majority of people, good summer vacation is an incentive to work harder and achieve new heights. Make your content the motivational and relaxing at the same time. By mastering this fine science, you’ll retain the clients during the entire year, both in hot and slow seasons.

 

About the Author

Maria Plahonina is a chief marketing officer of the international digital marketing agency, ReVerb. She is a tech-savvy marketing specialist responsible for creating and promoting enthusiastic brand messages that resonate with a company’s target audience. Her expertise includes blogging, SEO, design, social media marketing, email marketing, branding, and PR.