How to keep your marketing going while you're on vacation
How to keep your marketing going while you're on vacation
- Ever wonder how other small business owners and entrepreneurs can take worry-free vacations?
- Concerned that you’ll lose all of your marketing momentum if you take a personal holiday?
- Not sure what you need to do to keep your marketing going while you unplug for a bit?
You’ve come to the right place!
As Gatineau’s SME marketing specialists, and as a SME ourselves, we know exactly what steps you should take in order to keep your marketing humming along while you’re relaxing on vacation. Trust us, it can be done and we’re going to give you a small peek into how we support our clients so that their clients never miss a beat during summer vacation.
Letting your clients know. Or not.
There are two major camps when it comes to messaging during a vacation:
- tell your clients that you will be on vacation for a specified period of time; or
- don’t inform them of your absence
Both of these approaches to client communication have merit and allow you to keep your marketing efforts going while you’re away from your business for a holiday or vacation. The key to success in both situations is having a clear plan for keeping your marketing momentum going without interruption.
In other words, you want to know how to:
- stay top-of-mind for your clients while you’re gone
- generate new leads and prospects to follow up on when you’re back
- make sure your brand maintains a presence even if you’re not present yourself
Let’s look at some of the key pieces that go into a temporary vacation marketing strategy. If you are looking for support so that you can get away this summer, don’t hesitate to contact the team here at YannickWeb. We can help you identify what needs to be done so that your business doesn’t take a hit while you’re away. One of the benefits of working with an agency is that we have enough staff to rotate through our own vacations and are never closed, meaning we’ve always got your back!
Website banner or pop-up
If you want to inform your clients that your business will be impacted by a holiday, the most important place to do that is on your website. A high contrast banner or pop-up window is the best way to do this so that the information is easily visible and seen by all site guests who visit your website or landing page.
We do banners and pop-ups to tell customers about:
- holiday hours and closures of brick-and-mortar locations
- delayed response or shipping times
- COVID-19 procedures and restrictions
- alternate contact methods for emergency service
- and any other temporary messages you want to display
Posting your holiday information to your website has the most impact and holds the most authority for your clients. It shows clients that you care about keeping them informed and helps them plan a new date or time to contact you.
If you don’t have a website,
b) update your hours on your Google Business page.
Don’t have one of those either? Send up the bat signal, we’ll be right over!
Social Media
If your clients are accustomed to seeing regular posts from your company on social media, you can opt to continue that schedule while you’re away, or be transparent about why it has stopped. Either way, don’t ghost your clients and let them start to assume you’re unreliable or unresponsive.
A sudden stoppage or unexplained gap in your posting frequency can send an unintended message to your clients that you are not thriving as a business, or that you’ve closed doors altogether.
Here’s what to do to maintain a presence on social media while you are on vacation, depending on your level of transparency that we spoke about above.
Full disclosure:
- Post a message with details about your holidays. Be specific with dates, times, and which services/products will be available during that period. If you have a Facebook page, pin it to the top of your feed.
- Have a post designed and ready to post when you are back from holidays. If you are concerned that you might forget to send the message when you’re back, schedule it to post at opening time on the day of your return.
- Change your auto responder in any social media messaging apps to let people know when they can expect to hear from you.
- Optional: schedule some posts to remind clients that you’re on holiday and looking forward to serving them when you’re back.
If you are not informing clients of your holiday:
- Have a number of posts prepared and scheduled to post at regular times throughout your holiday period. Stick to “safe” content that isn’t likely to generate any urgent questions or comments.
- Change your auto responder in any social media messaging apps to let people know when they can expect to hear from you.
- Turn off unmoderated comment capabilities if you are concerned that anyone will hijack your scheduled posts with malicious, hateful, or simply irrelevant comments.
By formulating and implementing a plan for your social media during holidays, you’ll be able to keep your marketing momentum going and stay top-of-mind for current and prospective clients.
Don’t forget to feed the … search engine!
Posting regular updates to your website is essential for maintaining strong SEO (search engine optimization) and making sure that your website shows up on Google searches. Our most successful clients are posting monthly blog posts as part of their marketing strategies.
So while you’re away on holidays, make sure Google is still being fed! Scheduling blog posts or news updates to be published (and shared to your social media channels) is the easiest way to do this and will also help you stay top-of-mind for your clients while you’re relaxing on vacation.
We’ve got your back!
Small and medium-sized business owners deserve vacations just as much as anyone else (if not more, if you ask us!). We know that it can be stressful to unplug, worrying that you won’t have any fresh leads or will lose touch with your client base if you take a break. The solution is to trust an agency like YannickWeb to keep your marketing sailing along while you’re enjoying some down time. Let’s talk today so that you can start planning your summer getaway.
