10 Tips on How to End Your Year Marketing Strong in Summit County, CO
10 Tips on How to End Your Year Marketing Strong
Ways to focus on your business during the slow season in Colorado.
We're in the final stretch of the year. The last quarter is usually when many businesses start to scramble in a last-minute effort to reach their annual goals.
But for us in Breckenridge and Summit County, Colorado, it's not just the last quarter. It's also "shoulder season": The time of year when things start to slow down, tourism slows drastically, and exhausted business owners are ready to take time off.
But before you close the doors on your business for your fall vacation, you may want to stop and start thinking about the new year before things kick back into high gear for ski season!
Like a car whose engine goes dead after sitting idly for too long, your small business marketing can fall apart if you don't keep the momentum going through the slow season.
Here are ten tips for how to end your year strong when it comes to your small business marketing:
1. Become an outsider.
And no, I don't mean excluding yourself from the rest of the world. Instead, take a moment to step back and look at your business from the outside. Ask yourself: What's working? What isn't?
Take the shoulder season as an opportunity to reflect on what went right and what went wrong in business, and then learn from it! By temporarily becoming an outsider to your business, you'll be able to see more clearly what adjustments you need and then use that information to build your roadmap for the upcoming busy season and year ahead.
2. Evaluate your brand and messaging.
The last quarter of the year is an excellent time to evaluate the impactfulness of your brand and messaging and decide whether you need to tweak what you are currently or doing or take a new approach altogether.
If your brand and messaging haven't been resonating with your ideal audience the way you intend it to, perhaps it's time to do a brand audit to uncover where things aren't quite hitting the mark.
Here are 6 questions to ask yourself for an end-of-year brand check-in.
3. Plan out your content.
If you use social media or e-mail to keep in touch with and provide information to your clients and customers, use the shoulder season to put together a solid content calendar for the upcoming weeks or months. If you have a blog for your business, this is the ideal time to map out your editorial calendar for the forthcoming months.
Doing so will not only help you develop a clear path of action when it comes to your marketing messaging and getting in front of your audience, but it will also save you lots of time once things get busy again.
4. Update your website.
Next to social media and e-mail, your website is one of the major touch points your audience will have with your business. That said, you'll want to use the shoulder season to clean things up and make sure that the information you're presenting is still timely and relevant.
One of the ways you can do this is to make sure your SEO is updated and on point. Update your copyright dates at the bottom of your website. Refresh your "freebies" if you have them. If you have any date- or time-specific information on your site, make sure it gets updated.
5. Take a look at the marketing tools you use.
Take this opportunity to evaluate the marketing tools and applications that you are currently using in your business. Are they helping you reach your business and marketing goals? Are they making your operations easy, or are they just making things more complicated?
If you consider making changes to any of the tools you use, make those changes while business is slow to get familiar with them before the busy season hits again.
Check out this list of 17 time-saving tools and apps that'll make your small business marketing easier (as well as give you some well-deserved breathing room when the season picks up again).
6. Think about opportunities for automation.
After you evaluate your marketing tools and apps, think about how they can help you automate processes in your everyday operations.
Whether it's your social media posts, e-mails, or even parts of your sales and onboarding process, the more you can automate, the easier it will be for your business to essentially "run itself" during the busy season.
7. Rework your marketing budget.
If you have a marketing budget, this is an excellent time to think about your spending for ads, events, marketing tools, hiring assistance, etc. However, if you don't have a marketing budget, now is the time to put one together (yes, every business needs one)!
Remember that your budget isn't something to take lightly, especially when you are in growth mode. Consider hiring a financial planner to help you evaluate and make the appropriate decisions about your overall business budget.
8. Meet with your team (or meet with yourself).
The shoulder season is an opportune time to round up your staff for one-on-one meetings. These meetings will allow both of you to discuss their roles, their accomplishments, and their goals. It is also an opportunity to talk about your business goals going forward and how they will play a part in reaching those goals.
If you don't have a team, schedule some specific time in your calendar to think about what personal accomplishments you've made and what you want to accomplish in your business in the coming year.
9. Consider outsourcing.
The most successful business owners spend more time working ON their business rather than working IN it. So if your goal is to grow your business to new heights in the new year, now is the time to consider outsourcing the tedious, day-to-day tasks that are sucking up your time.
Hiring a VA to take the administrative or tech tasks off of your plate will free up your time to focus on the more strategic, profit-generating activities in your business, such as building client relationships and executing the strategies from your marketing and sales plan.
Furthermore, the quieter, shoulder season is the perfect time to hire and train someone and get them acclimated to your small business before things get back into full swing.
10. Celebrate yourself!
Last but not least, don't forget to pat yourself on the back for all that you've done in the prior year.
Celebrate the wins as well as the losses. Celebrate how much you have accomplished instead of getting yourself down about the goals you didn't quite hit the mark.
After all, it's not always about the destination, but the journey.