How much do you really need to change for successful summer marketing?
What’s the difference between winter and summer marketing strategies? You might think it’s simply a case of “Let’s sell swimwear instead of mittens”, but adapting your marketing for summer can involve much more than switching seasonal products.
The people you’re trying to reach don’t suddenly become completely different customers when the weather changes, and your brand shouldn’t suddenly become a completely different brand either. But the season can change the context around your audience: what they’re doing, where they’re spending their time and, for some businesses, what matters to them.
With the warmer months upon us, here are five changes worth considering to help your summer marketing stay relevant, engaging and connected to your wider strategy.
TL;DR
Successful summer marketing isn’t about changing everything simply because the season has changed. It’s about understanding whether summer genuinely affects your audience and adapting the right parts of your strategy.
To make your summer marketing work harder:
- Adapt your messaging to fit the moment without losing your usual brand voice.
- Think about where your audience is likely to be and how best to reach them.
- Review your marketing channels using your own data rather than relying on assumptions about summer behaviour.
- Explore relevant partnerships, sponsorships and collaborations.
- Plan around the specific summer moments that actually matter to your customers.
Most importantly, seasonal marketing shouldn’t replace everything else you’re doing. It should fit into and support your wider marketing strategy.
1. Tone of voice
In our article about emotional content marketing, we discussed tapping into consumers’ emotions and understanding what matters to the people you’re trying to reach. Summer can change the context around those needs, which means there may be good reasons to adapt your messaging too.
Let’s say you sell vegan food products. During Veganuary, you might find that health, lifestyle changes or trying something different are particularly relevant to your audience. During the summer, when people are thinking about barbecues and eating outside with friends and family, taste, convenience or having something great to put on the barbecue might become a stronger message.
It’s the same product and the same brand. What’s changed is the context around the customer.
That doesn’t mean throwing your existing tone of voice out of the window and suddenly filling every post with sunshine emojis. Your brand still needs to sound like you.
As we explain in our guide to creating a consistent tone of voice, familiarity and consistency help make a brand recognisable. So rather than changing your entire personality for summer, think about how your existing voice can respond naturally to what matters to your audience at that point in the year.
Keep the personality. Adapt the emphasis.
2. Stepping outside
“Build it, and they will come” goes against pretty much everything we know about marketing. Sometimes you have to take your marketing to the audience.
Summer can create different opportunities to do exactly that.
Depending on your customers, they may be travelling, attending festivals and sporting events, spending time in hospitality venues, visiting tourist destinations or simply following different routines. For the right business, that can open up opportunities for outdoor advertising, event marketing, local activity or campaigns connected to particular destinations.
But this doesn’t mean out-of-home advertising automatically becomes the best option as soon as summer arrives.
Start with the audience.
Where are the people you’re trying to reach likely to be? What will they be doing? Which places, platforms or situations give you a genuine opportunity to get their attention?
For one business, that might be an airport or festival. For another, it could still be Google, Instagram, email or somewhere completely different.
The point isn’t that everybody is suddenly outside. It’s that your audience’s context may have changed, and your marketing should respond if it has.
Go to them; don’t simply expect them to come looking for you.
3. Changing channels
That brings us nicely onto marketing channels.
The original advice here was based on the idea that people spend their summers out and about more, so businesses should reduce their reliance on channels such as email and focus more heavily on social media and mobile.
The problem is that there isn’t one universal summer customer.
A younger consumer audience, a parent planning school-holiday activities, a business decision-maker, somebody researching their next holiday and somebody looking for an emergency plumber could all behave very differently.
So before changing your channel strategy, look at what your own audience is actually doing.
Go back through previous summer campaigns and compare performance. Did email engagement really drop? Did social traffic increase? Was mobile responsible for a larger share of visits? Did particular paid channels perform better? Did people engage with campaigns but take longer to convert?
You may find clear seasonal patterns. You may find almost no difference at all.
At KAYBE, we’re big believers in choosing marketing channels around the audience, commercial objective and customer journey rather than using a particular platform simply because it’s popular. That principle applies just as much to summer marketing.
Don’t stop emailing because somebody has told you nobody checks their inbox in August. Equally, don’t ignore social, outdoor or event opportunities if your audience data suggests there’s something worth pursuing.
And remember that the channel itself is only one part of the campaign. The advert, email or social post needs to lead somewhere. Your landing page, message, call to action and follow-up all need to feel like part of the same journey.
Summer marketing works best when those pieces are connected rather than treated as separate activities.
4. Affiliations and collaborations
We’re used to seeing partnerships during major seasonal marketing periods such as Christmas and Easter. Summer may not have quite the same obvious calendar of commercial events, but it brings plenty of opportunities of its own.
Festivals, sporting events, hotels, tourist destinations, hospitality venues and community activities can all create opportunities for the right businesses.
Rather than limiting this to traditional affiliate marketing, think more broadly about partnerships, sponsorships and collaborations.
Strategic marketing is about identifying opportunities within the resources available to you, and the same applies here. Ask which other brands, organisations, venues or events already have the attention of people you’d like to reach.
Could you create a joint promotion? Sponsor something relevant? Produce content together? Offer something exclusively to one another’s customers? Build a competition or experience that gives both audiences a reason to engage?
The important thing is that the connection makes sense.
Two brands having summer campaigns at the same time isn’t enough reason to work together. There should be a genuine overlap between the audiences or something useful that the partnership enables you to offer.
If the collaboration makes sense to the customer, you’re probably onto something.
5. Plan around the summer moments that matter
The other thing worth remembering is that “summer” is a very broad marketing moment.
June, July and August don’t all look the same, and your customers aren’t necessarily thinking about the same things throughout the entire season.
There are school holidays, sporting events, festivals, weddings, travel periods, bank holidays and plenty of sector-specific moments that might affect what your audience wants or needs. Depending on your business, there may also be completely different peaks and quieter periods that have nothing to do with the traditional summer calendar.
So rather than creating something simply because it’s a “summer campaign”, work out which moments genuinely matter.
This is where planning ahead makes a big difference.
Our wider guide to seasonal marketing makes an important point: seasonal activity still has to fit around your existing marketing and business operations. If you know you want to take advantage of particular moments throughout the year, getting them into the marketing calendar early makes it much easier to manage resources and create something worthwhile.
The same thinking sits behind our 70-20-10 content marketing system. Timely and seasonal content can give your marketing a useful boost, but it works best when there’s a strong evergreen strategy underneath it.
Summer marketing should add something to the plan, not derail it.
Before changing anything, check the data
Before you start shifting budgets, changing channels or rewriting your campaign, take a look at what happened last summer.
It sounds obvious, but memory and data aren’t always telling you the same story.
Look at your previous campaign performance, website analytics, email activity, enquiries, sales and social engagement. Which channels brought people in? Which messages worked? Were there particular products, services or pieces of content that performed unusually well? Did certain weeks perform differently from others?
Most importantly, look at what happened after somebody engaged.
A campaign can generate plenty of clicks and still fail to produce anything commercially useful. Likewise, a channel with lower engagement might be responsible for some of your best enquiries.
That’s why we wouldn’t recommend making five changes at once simply because something didn’t work last summer. Work out where the problem actually was first.
Our guide to why marketing campaigns don’t land breaks this down into areas such as objectives, audience, channels, messaging, budget and resource. The same diagnostic approach is useful when you’re deciding what needs to change for a seasonal campaign.
Use what you’ve already learned before starting again.
What about summer marketing for B2B?
Of course, not every summer marketing strategy is aimed at consumers.
For B2B brands, summer brings a slightly different set of considerations. Annual leave, school holidays, internal resources and longer buying processes can all affect campaign timings and engagement.
That doesn’t necessarily mean marketing should stop until September.
A quieter period can still be useful for nurturing relationships, maintaining visibility, testing ideas or preparing activity for later in the year.
We’ve covered that side of the subject separately in our guide to approaching summer marketing as a B2B brand, so if your audience is primarily business decision-makers, that’s the better place to go next.
Summer marketing FAQs
What is summer marketing?
Summer marketing is marketing activity that responds to relevant seasonal behaviours, events, opportunities or customer needs during the summer months.
That could include adapting your messaging, running a particular campaign, changing where you promote your business, creating timely content or partnering with another organisation.
The key is relevance. You don’t need to create a summer version of everything you do simply because the calendar says June.
Does every business need a summer marketing strategy?
No.
Some businesses experience obvious seasonal changes in demand or customer behaviour, while others may see very little difference.
Look at your customers, previous performance and commercial priorities before deciding how much resource summer marketing deserves. Sometimes a major campaign makes sense. Sometimes a few timely changes to existing activity are enough.
When should you start planning summer marketing?
It depends on what you’re creating.
A relatively simple social campaign might not need months of preparation, while something involving partnerships, events, paid media, new creative, landing pages or email journeys will need considerably more planning.
Work backwards from the date the campaign needs to reach your audience and allow enough time for production, approvals, testing and launch.
Should I change marketing channels during summer?
Only if your audience behaviour or campaign objective gives you a reason to.
Your own data is much more useful than assuming that everyone uses more social media, less email or spends all summer away from a screen.
Review previous performance and adapt the channel mix where there’s evidence that it makes sense.
Does summer marketing work for B2B?
Yes, but B2B summer marketing usually requires a different approach.
Annual leave and slower decision-making can affect campaign timing, but summer can also provide opportunities to nurture prospects, build awareness, test content and prepare for activity later in the year.
If that’s your audience, take a look at our dedicated B2B summer marketing guide.
How do you measure whether a summer campaign worked?
Start with what you wanted the campaign to achieve.
That might be awareness, traffic, leads, bookings, sales or another commercial outcome. Then look at which messages, channels and parts of the customer journey contributed towards that result.
Don’t just measure the loudest metric. A huge number of likes doesn’t automatically make a campaign commercially successful, just as fewer clicks don’t necessarily mean the campaign failed.
Capture what worked and what didn’t while the campaign is still fresh. Next summer, you’ll have much better information to work with.
Summer marketing: change what needs changing
Summer marketing doesn’t have to mean ripping up your usual strategy and starting again.
The strongest opportunities come from understanding where the season genuinely changes things for your audience and adjusting your marketing accordingly.
That might mean different messaging, a shift in channels, taking your campaign somewhere new, building a clever partnership or making the most of a particular seasonal moment.
It might also mean looking at your data and deciding that some things don’t need changing at all.
The aim isn’t to make your marketing look more summery. It’s to make sure it stays relevant.
Planning your next campaign?
A good summer idea still needs the right audience, message, channels and customer journey behind it.
If you’re putting together your next campaign, read our guide to why marketing campaigns don’t land to see the six areas worth checking before you start changing things.
