Slow holiday season ?

The Summer is well and truly upon us now and the holiday season is well under way. For many businesses, this means that things can slow down a little as your customers are away on vacation or are getting ready to go away so they don’t want to start things until they get back from their break and the kids have gone back to school.

So, this is an ideal time for you to catch up on some of the tasks you haven’t had time to do. One area that often gets neglected is marketing, particularly in small businesses.

As a small business, there is always so much to do working “in” your business; customer work must obviously come first so this means often that working “on” your business gets shifted down your list of priorities. Items like marketing tend to take a back seat but then when things slow down, you suddenly realise you haven’t been doing anything to bring in the next lot of work.

For many, finding time to regularly update their website and add content to it is difficult so it can mean that no changes are done for some considerable time in many cases.

The problem with this is that once someone has visited your site and read through the content, if it never changes, what is there to bring them back again for another visit ?

One of the main purposes of a website is for it to promote you as the expert in your field so visitors want to know that they can find the information or answers they are looking for from you. The simplest way to achieve this is by using your website, if it is kept up to date with interesting, engaging content and they can find it easily on your site, they are more likely to come back to you, not your competitors.

One great way to add new, relevant content to your site is by means of a blog. The blog should be part of your website rather than separate so it is all together under your business domain name (e.g. mybusiness.co.uk). It is quite logical really, when they visit your blog, they are already on your website so they are more likely to have a look at the other pages while they are there.

Many associate a blog with regular daily posts which can put some people off making a commitment to publishing a blog. Don’t worry about this, if you don’t want to publish so often, change the name from “blog” to “news” – this can lower the expectation so you only post an article when you have something worthwhile to say (which is the way it should be).

A good tip is to write a few articles in advance so that you always have one or two in reserve, this takes some of the pressure off as you always have one ready to publish.

Don’t forget that you need to make use of your other marketing channels to drive traffic to your website so make sure your share your posts on social media when you publish them.

Happy holidays !