Summer marketing ideas you need to try

Summer Marketing Ideas - photo of a 99 ice cream on the beach

So, here we are – Summer 2022. We’re over halfway through the year and now entering the warmer months (well, as warm as we can get here in the UK anyway!).

During this time of the year, businesses can experience one of their slower seasons, especially if you are a smaller company. With many people either away on holiday, out enjoying the sunshine or busy keeping the kids entertained during the summer holidays, it often means that customers are less-engaged online whilst they are pre-occupied with other activities.

However, saying that… it doesn’t have to result in less revenue for your business! Now is the perfect time to re-engage with your customers by putting some fresh summer marketing ideas into action.

Let’s dive in to some we think you need to try.

Create A Google Ads Local Campaign

If you’ve never created a Google Ad local campaign before, this summer is a great time to start. Local campaigns are a fantastic way to drive traffic to physical based locations, such as restaurants or retail stores for example.Google Local Campaigns - Map Pin Marketing

These campaigns can give wide exposure as they run across several areas – including the Google Search & Display Networks, Google Maps and YouTube.

For businesses, where this tool would really come into its own during the summer period would be through the option to ‘pin’ special offers to your map pin. Taking advantage of this part of the campaign option would help you engage with potential customers, making deals easier to find whilst they’re browsing online.

You can find out more about Google Ads local campaigns here. Feel free to reach out to us if you need to book any support with the set up.

Piggyback On Key Summer Events

From the Wimbledon Tennis Championships to Brighton Pride, there’s a whole host of exciting annual events that run throughout the summer months. If you’re ever short of marketing ideas, piggybacking on some of these is the perfect inspiration to help become part of the wider conversation, boost your brand awareness, and add a real human, live, topical moment touch to your feed.Summer event marketing ideas- Wimbledon

Check out one of our previous Tweets themed around Wimbledon in 2018… Here we shared an external article around Serena Williams’ 25th seed for Wimbledon, building anticipation ahead of the championships by asking an engaging question and including key hashtags for reach such as #matchpoint, #Wimbledon and #Wimbledon2018. Why not start building your summer social media content by checking out Visit Britain’s round up of key annual events.

Tap Into ‘Themed Days’ Relevant To Your Business

Linking in nicely with our previous point, you can also tap into themed awareness days that are relevant to your brand that fall throughout the summer months.
Trust us, this is something that there’s never any shortage of! There’s pretty much a themed day that can fit with most business types out there. So get creative, and have fun.  For example, coming up on 4th August this year, we have…

National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day!

This, of course, would be a great fit for a small independent bakery or café that wants to highlight one of their menu items – or simply dedicate a post to the delight that is, a cookie.

National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day August - Blondies Kitchen

For example, last year on Instagram, popular cookie bar Blondies Kitchen (we MUST visit!) chose to highlight their classic chocolate chip cookie – tapping into the trending hashtag to boost awareness.

With some preparation, you could even theme some Summer special offers or promotions around the upcoming day that you have chosen, relevant to your business.

Check out this super useful guide on upcoming themed days in the UK.
However, we’re sure this is not an exhaustive list – so do your research and we are sure you will find so many more. This may be something that you’d like to take forward throughout the other seasons as well.

Refresh Your Visuals

Summer calls for a refreshed look across your digital presence. To help resonate with your customers, think about refreshing your visuals to tie in with the season and the events surrounding it. This will make your business look fresh and with your finger on the pulse, with customers more likely to choose you over a competitor with outdated visuals.

There are many ways that you can do this, including:

• Updating your social platforms to include a summer themed header
• Adapting your profile icon to include sun emojis or a similar small summer accent
• Updating key landing pages on your website to highlight special summer offers or essentials.

Tesco Seasonal 'Bursting with Pride' refresh

For example, in June, Tesco updated their Facebook header and profile icon to theme around Pride Month, whilst still cleverly linking back to their brand – with the use of a rainbow of fruit and vegetables and change in colour to the 5 dashes underneath ‘Tesco’ in their logo.

So, there we go! Some top Summer marketing ideas from us, a gift to you. We hope we have inspired you to get creative this Summer – do let us know if you try out any of these in the blog comments below and feel free to get in touch if you need any support.

Have a wonderful Summer, whatever you’re up to!

Rachael Dines, Shake It Up Creative