If your business is barbecues, sunglasses and beer, then summer is a hot time for your marketing efforts. This also is the season for a deluge of those “HOT SUMMER MADNESS!” sales from car dealers and the like. 

But what if you’re in the B2b world and your prospects have visions of summer vacation in their heads? If they are in the office, will they pay the slightest attention to your carefully crafted email offer, glossy postcard pitch, or full-page ad? And if they’re out on vacation, then what?

Some marketers believe that dollars budgeted for marketing programs during summer months are dollars better saved for the rainy days of autumn. They reason that customers and prospects are either 1) out on vacation; 2) cramming at work getting ready to go on vacation; or 3) buried because they’ve just come back from vacation. Mail piles up. Email goes unread. Voice mail is automatic. 

Although all this may have a ring of truth, summer still is an important time to push marketing programs. Here’s four reasons why marketing is for all seasons:

1. The Numbers Game. Let’s say everyone took a vacation in summer. There are nine weeks in the summer season of July and August. That would average out to 11% of workers being on vacation in any given week (if everyone took a summer vacation, and not everyone does). So you might ask: Can you afford to spend money on marketing programs when 11% of your prospects might not get your message during the week it arrives? A better question is this: Can you afford not to market when in fact 89% of your prospects will receive your message? By the way, if you don’t market, it’s guaranteed that 100% of your prospects will not receive your message.
2. Frequency, Frequency. Everyone knows the key to successful marketing is frequency. Because you’ve been regularly touching customers and prospects all winter and spring — building relationships, earning leads, filling the pipeline — if you stop or slow down in the summer months, you’ll feel the effects later. Plus, believe it or not, you’re not the first thing on your prospects’ minds. They can and will forget you. And maybe remember your competitor instead, who decides that marketing in summer is a worthy endeavor.
3. It’s Budget Time. For a lot of companies, summer is the season for building the following fiscal year’s budgets. If you’re in front of customers and prospects now, they’re more likely to remember that you can solve a problem they’re struggling with, increasing the likelihood they’ll include an investment in your solution as part of their next budget. In fact, you might even remind them to do just that.
4. Work Goes On. Sure, we all take vacation, but the fact is, we all have a job to do and work goes on across all four seasons, not just three. For better or worse, more and more workers are staying connected to the office during vacation, and many take along a work version of summer reading. This is a good time to send out a key white paper or an important article, maybe even labeled “Summer Reading.”

Hope everyone enjoys the summer. Keep your marketing going!