5 Hot Summer Marketing Ideas to Give Your Business A Boost

Unless you sell beach hats or slushies, summer can be a slow season for many businesses.

That’s why the summer months are an ideal time to experiment with fun, seasonal campaigns. Heat up sales and boost your customer engagement with these lively, life-giving options.

Use Giveaways to Learn About Your Clients

“You’ve Got Tech Problems? I’ve Got Answers.”

Nikole Gipps is the founder and developer extraordinaire behind “That Super Girl.” Specializing in online support services for small businesses, Gipps grows her base seasonally by featuring “Summer of Learning” giveaways. Weekly emails boast giveaway choices (like business books) and tutorial freebies. Her recent contests increased customer engagement, doubled the subscriber list, increased workshop enrollment, and offered insights into topics that interested people most.

What freebie could you use to spark interest this summer and build momentum for the fall? Start dreaming today and create lasting benefits for your business.

Lower Prices as Temperatures Rise

Want to have a little fun with the heat?

Offer discounts that increase in proportion to the temperature. For example:

–Give clients $10 of any purchase of $100 or more when the temperature rises above 100 degrees

–Try a “pay 80 percent” promotion for any day temps land in the 80s

–Post sunny “peak” discounts on the day Summer Solstice occurs

Launch a “Staff Favorites” Campaign

Everyone enjoys a good-natured rivalry, so have some fun while rewarding your best employees with a summer getaway or a valuable gift card.

Here you can generate friendly competition among staff members by asking customers to vote on their favorite barista, customer service rep, or sales associate. Clients can vote through social media, digital polls, or onsite displays. This can humanize your brand and incentivize your team to provide stellar personal service.

Give Away Summer Swag

Businesses need promotional items to help reach out to potential customers and clients – it’s just a fact.

Like a business card with a bang, clever promotional products build goodwill, name recognition, and expanded brand exposure. Looking for affordable items to catch prospects’ attention? Try frisbees, stress balls, customized lip balms, labeled clip and go hand sanitizers, zip-front drawstring bags, absorbent cooling towels, water bottles, and more.

Beautiful Outdoor Banners

It never hurts to have friends in high places, so go BIGGER with large-scale banners!

Ensure your message wins the day with this hard-to-miss publicity tool. Vibrant, strategically placed outdoor banners can grab attention near busy intersections, at the entrance of your business, or at festivals and high-traffic events. Try hanging pole banners, feather flags, retractable banners, or a giant step and repeat display (great for photo ops and selfies).

Use Sizzling Incentives to Tip Them Toward Action

Summer is a perfect time for celebration, refreshment, and the unique expression of your brand.

Want to increase the emotional attachment customers have to your business? From a dash of color on your packaging to gorgeous window decals, print promotions can be part of any summer campaign. Want to talk options? Contact us today for samples.

Build Customer Confidence: 4 Brand Identity Essentials

Trust builds confidence.

That is why a strong corporate brand identity can make or break a business. Brand identity is more than key values or approved color palettes; it is the collection of all elements that a company creates to portray the right image to its consumer. Here is one helpful way to describe it:

Brand identity is the image or character of your business as people relate to it. For example, the BMW image of elite luxury has grown naturally from customers’ repeated exposure to BMW’s ads, endorsements, and products.

Brand imagery is the aesthetic appearance of your brand’s core identity and messaging. This results from all the visuals (from billboards, print ads, or product packaging) that represent your brand’s identity.

When a company has a strong brand, it is easily recognized, which grows people’s trust. Trust builds confidence, and confidence begets loyalty. When a business has built superiority in a particular niche, repeat customers are more willing to buy in other areas. When you have loyalty from your base, you have space to increase prices or ask for bigger commitments. 

Breaking Down the Brand Experience

When building a brand, think of an iceberg in which only the tip is visible.

The substance exists below the waterline. The brand elements that are most seen and celebrated (like brand imagery) are not always the most important. The brand experience – the mosaic of customer interactions people have with your business – is part of a greater journey.

Here are four dimensions of this mosaic:

1. Brand Voice

If your brand was a person, what would they sound like?

Are they loud and animated or reserved and refined? An organization’s name, tagline, and editorial style comprise an overall projection of its voice. As these elements are developed, consider how the words would sound in the mouth of a brand spokesperson or its founder.

Also, try to contrast the voice of your competitors. If your rival brand has a highly polished voice, you might consider adopting a friendly, down-to-earth style.

2. Consistency in Core Elements

Building the foundation of your identity starts with identifying core elements.

Strong brands create a style guide that anchors them to brand colors, key fonts, a logo projected across different backgrounds, and a style they hope to express (e.g., “elegant, clean, scalable, approachable yet excellent”).

Once you’ve nailed these keys, you can embellish with design tweaks, humor, or variations on patterns (of ads, print layouts, customer stories, and more). Like music, good design balances order and variation to make a beautiful composition.

3. Total Time

People want to feel like they are in control.

The total time invested in transactions is an essential consideration for today’s consumers. Don’t want to wait in a massive drive-through line? Order ahead in the app. Hate the grocery store line? Use the self-checkout. Perhaps you need to focus less on saving them money and more on saving them time.

Small tweaks you make to the customer experience can assure clients that their time is valuable.

4. Framing Customer Choices

Brand building is about affecting customer choice.

While prospects initially engage with emotional triggers like color, shape, image, or tone, eventually, they’ll ask deeper questions about their spending or time commitments. This involves both upfront expenses and opportunity costs; if customers buy from you, they implicitly say no to another brand.

Think strategically about speaking to buyer emotions regarding loss aversion, short-term sacrifices (vs. long-term gains), or sunk costs (how people don’t want to lose what has already been invested).

Brand identity goes beyond simple appearance. Decisions you make about voice, consistency, time, and customer choices can create strong feelings that prompt a profitable response!