While it’s tempting to slow down your marketing efforts once summer is in full swing, the slower season is actually the perfect time to ramp them up.  

The key to any good PR strategy is to stay active and consistent. If you let your PR and marketing efforts go stale for even a month, you risk losing valuable leads and awareness you worked so hard to generate throughout the first half of the year. 

To ensure that your startup not only stays afloat during this time, but continues to generate new leads, spread brand awareness, drive traffic and position itself in a successful place for a busy fall, it may be time to rethink your communications strategy. 

Here are a few ways to avoid a summer slump and prepare for the rest of the year. 

Commit to content marketing

The upside to summer being a slow time for business is that you may find yourself with more time on your hands. If this is the case, then consider using this newfound time to create more content for your content marketing strategy. 

Whether ramping up the amount of blog posts your startup produces, working on a couple white papers or how-to guides, or even creating engaging infographics, there are numerous forms of content to create that will draw in potential customers. Plus, you can even try to use that infographic to get media coverage for your startup, making it doubly worth the effort. Putting in the work now will prove to be more than worth it down the line once you begin drawing in new leads from something you worked on months ago.

Explore working with a tech PR agency

Having fewer eyes on your marketing initiatives is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, you can use this opportunity to experiment with a marketing channel you haven’t tried or don’t normally have time for during your peak season. 

For example, if you’ve yet to explore working with a tech PR agency for your early stage startup, then now may be a good time to consider how outsourcing earned media efforts can strengthen your overall marketing strategy. Not only does media coverage help with brand awareness and reach, but earned media can reinforce your brand’s overall digital strategy by driving more traffic and engagement to paid and owned content. And this slower season is the perfect time to build a relationship with a tech PR agency so that you have a solid foundation for your PR and marketing efforts before business picks back up in the fall. 

Plan ahead for social media

It’s essential to keep your audience informed and engaged year round, even during slower periods when there’s nothing new to announce or launch. And much like your other marketing channels, your company’s social media accounts must remain consistent and active throughout the summer. The key to staying on top of your social efforts during the summer is to keep flexible schedules in mind. 

If the person who normally runs your company’s social media is going on vacation, for example, then it would be wise to prepare ahead of time so that your social media channels don’t go dark while that person is out. Take advantage of one of the many social media scheduling tools at your disposal to ensure that your company continues to publish valuable social media content. It would also be a good idea to have someone else on the team monitor the various channels for engagement. 

Rethink your PR and marketing strategy 

If nothing else, summer is an excellent opportunity to evaluate and re-work your marketing strategy. 

Take a look at how the first half of the year has panned out. Have you hit your goals? If not, what can you tweak in your marketing plan to ensure you achieve those goals by the end of the year and still meet your bottom line? 

When reevaluating your marketing strategy, it’s important to view it through an objective lens and be honest about what’s working and, more importantly, what isn’t. You may have to go back to the drawing board to make sure the basics like buyer personas, campaign messaging and distribution tactics are still a good fit. If you’re working with a tech PR agency, plan a midyear discussion to revisit your yearly goals and get on the same page about the plan of action for the second half of the year. 

Summer may be a slow season for business, but startup founders and marketers should view this time as a chance to get ahead of your efforts for fall so that you can end the year strong. 

About Sam Lauron: Sam is the Content Marketing Manager for Swyft, which is a tech PR firm in Austin and Houston and a top digital marketing and PR agency in Denver since its founding in 2011. Swyft recently opened a satellite office where it offers tech PR in San Francisco. Swyft was also listed as one of the top tech PR agencies in Texas by the B2B services review site, Clutch.co.