169: Your Minimal Summer Vacation Marketing Plan
Welcome back! As the school year wraps up and summer approaches, it's tempting to take our foot off the gas pedal and relax.
But today, I'm here to share why it's crucial to keep your business momentum going through the summer months.
In this episode, I discuss practical strategies to streamline your digital product business for the summer months, ensuring that you are set up for a strong finish to the year.
From outsourcing tasks to automating your marketing and planning your content ahead of time, I've got you covered with tips to help you stay productive even while enjoying your well-deserved break.
So, let's dive into how you can keep your business thriving during the summer months and beyond.
Keep Your Business Momentum Alive This Summer
As the school year wraps up here in Atlanta, we are busy with end-of-year activities. My high schooler finished his last exam today, and my middle schooler has his 8th grade graduation tomorrow. It’s incredible how quickly the year has flown by, and I can’t believe my youngest is heading to high school next year.
During the summer, I like to take things a bit easier. After recovering from knee replacement surgery, I’m excited to get back on the courts for some tennis and maybe try out pickleball. I also love spending time by the pool and just being outside. Despite the fun and relaxation that summer brings, I know that I can’t completely take my foot off the gas pedal when it comes to my business. The actions we take now directly impact our revenue and growth in the fall.
Why You Shouldn’t Take a Summer Break from Your Business
Summer is a time for vacations, travel baseball, and relaxation, but it’s also crucial to keep your business momentum going. The work you do now sets the stage for your success in the fall. So, today, I want to share some strategies to streamline your digital product business over the summer while maintaining growth and preparing for a strong finish to the year.
The Power of Outsourcing
One of the best ways to streamline your business operations during the summer is to outsource time-consuming tasks. By leveraging the skills of freelancers or virtual assistants, you can offload tasks that are draining your time and energy, freeing you up to focus on more strategic areas of your business.
For example, if one of your goals is to build out an eCommerce store and drive traffic through SEO and Pinterest strategies, consider outsourcing the product uploads, image optimization, and SEO tasks. As I mentioned in the podcast, these tasks can be incredibly time-consuming, and your core strengths may lie elsewhere. By outsourcing, you can make progress on your goals while also freeing up time for other priorities or simply enjoying your summer.
Automating Your Marketing Machine
Your marketing efforts are a goldmine for automation. By setting up systems and processes to run on autopilot, you can maintain a consistent presence and nurture your audience without being chained to your desk.
Start by automating your email marketing campaigns. Set up a series of newsletters or promotional emails to go out at scheduled times, ensuring your audience stays engaged even when you're lounging by the pool. Additionally, consider automating your lead generation processes, social media posting, and sales funnels.
One key automation to implement is a tripwire funnel. When someone signs up for your lead magnet, present them with a low-cost offer (the tripwire) that, if purchased, can upsell them into your core product or service. This automated funnel can generate revenue while you're enjoying your summer vacation.
Batch and Repurpose Your Content
Content creation can be a time-consuming endeavor, but batching and repurposing can significantly ease the burden. Set aside dedicated time to produce multiple pieces of content in one sitting – record a series of videos, write a batch of blog posts, or produce several podcast episodes.
Then, take that fresh content and repurpose it into different formats. Turn a blog post into a video, or extract key segments from a podcast episode to create social media clips. By repurposing your content, you can maximize its reach and provide value to your audience across various channels without constantly starting from scratch.
Visibility and Affiliate Marketing
While you may be working reduced hours or taking vacations, it's crucial to maintain focus on audience growth strategies. Participate in bundle promotions, speak at virtual summits, or collaborate with peers through freebie swaps. These visibility initiatives will keep you top-of-mind with your audience and attract new potential customers.
Additionally, don't forget about affiliate marketing. Promoting products or services as an affiliate can generate revenue without the burden of delivering the offer yourself. Use your email newsletters, social media channels, and automation sequences to promote affiliate offers seamlessly.
Your Super Simple Planning Tool
To help you streamline your summer marketing efforts, I'm sharing my super simple Google Sheet that I use to plan and track everything. This spreadsheet includes columns for:
Promotions (your own products, affiliate offers, visibility collaborations)
Content planning (blog posts, videos, podcast episodes)
Sections for your email newsletter
Tracking key metrics like open rates and clicks
By having a centralized place to plan and track your marketing activities, you can ensure a consistent flow of valuable content and promotions, even when you're working reduced hours or enjoying a summer getaway.
Embrace the Summer Mindset
As entrepreneurs, it can be tempting to keep pushing relentlessly, even during the summer months. However, it's crucial to find that balance – to prioritize your well-being while still nurturing your business and audience.
By implementing the strategies outlined in this post – outsourcing, automating, batching and repurposing content, and focusing on visibility and affiliate marketing – you can optimize your operations for the summer months. This will not only allow you to enjoy a well-deserved break but also set the stage for a strong finish to the year.
As the fall season approaches, you'll be well-positioned to capitalize on the momentum you've built, launch new products or services, and continue driving your digital product business forward with renewed energy and focus.
So, embrace the summer mindset. Streamline your processes, automate your marketing, and repurpose your content. But most importantly, don't forget to take that much-needed break, recharge your batteries, and come back stronger than ever.
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Transcript:
Dr. Destini Copp [00:00:00]:
Hi there. Destini here, and I am so excited about our podcast episode topic for today. Here in Atlanta, we're in our last week of school. My high schooler had his last exam today, and my middle schooler has his 8th grade graduation tomorrow, and then we are done. I cannot believe how fast this school year went and that my youngest is going into high school next year. Now in the summer, I do like to take it a little easier. Now now that my knee has recovered from knee replacement surgery, I definitely would like to get back on the courts and maybe trying out a little tennis again, but definitely getting into pickleball. I also like to spend time in our pool and just be outside.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:00:53]:
We have several trips planned this summer for travel baseball and vacations, and I know that my time is going to be limited. But at the same time, I know that I cannot take my foot off the gas pedal because if I do, it would definitely affect my revenue and business growth for the fall. So, basically, what I'm doing now, I will see the results several months down the road. And I'm bringing up this topic because we are moving into summer. But just know that everything I'm covering today can also be applied to your business at any time that you want to save time or just stop being overwhelmed, which if I had to guess is pretty much all year long. I think the key for the summer months is finding the right balance between streamlining your processes and continuing to focus on growth strategies that will set you up for success in the fall. So if there's one thing that I don't want you to stop doing even over the summertime, that is focusing on growth strategies for your business. But in this episode, I want to give you some ways that you can streamline your digital product business this summer while keeping your foot on the gas pedal to ensure that you are setting up your business for a strong finish for the year.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:02:32]:
So the first thing I wanna talk about is streamlining your operations. This is essential for any business, but it is even more critical during the summer when you're taking vacation or you just want to work reduced hours. And one of the best ways to streamline your work for the summer is to outsource. As I was outlining this podcast episode, I realized, you know what? I need to practice what I'm preaching. And this is when I came to this realization. I have some goals. I have made very little progress on this year, and it's getting close to the end of the May. So the year is almost halfway over.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:03:22]:
And it's really just because I've been too busy to work on those particular goals. So instead of keep putting them off, which is what I've been doing because I haven't had the time to focus on them, what I really need to do is to outsource these tasks. But this is really more than just reducing my overwhelm or freeing up my time. I know by by leveraging the skill of freelancers or maybe even hiring a virtual assistant to do some of this, I can offload these time consuming tasks, but more importantly, put my focus in a more strategic part of my business. So I want to give you a specific example here. One of my goals this year is to build out our 2 Shopify stores and use Pinterest and SEO strategies to drive traffic to these stores. So my core strength is not uploading 300 plus new products into a Shopify store, which will require me to create the images, optimize the images, write the product description, make sure everything's connected to ConvertKit, making sure that the product download is working correctly and, you know, going through and making sure that everything is optimized for SEO. Yes.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:04:52]:
I need to manage the process. Yes. I need to guide somebody on this, on exactly what I'm looking for. But really quite frankly, my time is better spent elsewhere. So I have decided that this is something I need to outsource over the summer. So that way I can make progress on one of my key goals for 2024, but it's also gonna free up some of my time. Now the next way to streamline your business for the summer is marketing automation. Now some of this you can also outsource, but I'm gonna primarily focus on you kinda doing the work, but, you know, making sure that everything is automated.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:05:37]:
And I would have to say that your marketing is a gold mine for automation. And if you, like I said, if you don't have the time or the skill to set up some of the automations that I'm gonna be talking about, You can get somebody who is skilled in those areas to either do the do it for you or help you do it. So you can automate your email marketing, your lead generation, your social media marketing, and, of course, sales funnels. So marketing omnichannel and having this set up over the summer can help you maintain a consistent presence, but also nurture your audience while freeing up time more for you to focus on something that's a little bit more strategic or quite frankly just taking time off for the summer. So at a minimum, I'd love for you to set up your email newsletter so that they are ready and waiting in your email service provider to go out every week at a set date and time. And before we end our conversation today, I'm gonna give you access to my super simple spreadsheet to help you plan out your email newsletters this summer and other content and marketing promotions that you are going to do. And if you don't already have this set up, I also like you to have a sales funnel set up so that when somebody signs up for your lead magnet over the summer, you have this trip wire where you can gain an instant customer, and you have a sales funnel set up on the back end. So how you can set this up when they you know, you have the lead magnet, they sign up for your lead magnet, and then you have a tripwire on the next page.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:07:28]:
And then if they go to checkout, you can have an order bump and upsells on the back end of that tripwire. Now if you don't have that tripwire set up, even if somebody signs up for your lead magnet, you're gonna have, like, an email welcome sequence to nurture them, and you can still eventually promote one of your courses or your digital products or maybe even, you know, some products that you are an affiliate for. You can still promote them in that email sequence, and it's all automated for you. Now next, I want to talk about planning out your content for over the summer and batch production, which will help you streamline your processes and continue to nurture your audience even while you are working reduced hours. And I'll be honest here with you. I am not great at batch production. So I typically don't sit down one day and do a bunch of podcast recordings in one day. That's just not typically what I do.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:08:34]:
I tend to create content when I'm inspired or have a message to communicate, but I definitely see the benefit, especially when we're moving into the summertime to block out a dedicated time to produce multiple pieces of content in one sitting, whether that's recording a series of videos, writing a a batch of blog posts, or producing your podcast episodes. So that is my goal for the next couple weeks is to batch produce some podcast episodes so I don't have to worry about them in June July. So not only will this batching help me maximize productivity, but it's also gonna help you plan and schedule your content in advance. So you have to have this done before you can work on the other stuff that I'm talking with you about. So by having a content calendar in place, and you can use the content planning column in my super simple spreadsheet that I'm gonna share with you today to make sure that you do this. So you can make sure that you have a consistent flow of very valuable content for your audience throughout the summer months even when you're taking a well deserved break. But, also, which is just as important, I want you to consider repurposing your content. So maybe if you've been doing this for a while, maybe you don't even have to create new content.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:10:12]:
Summertime is the perfect time to dust off some of your highest performing content, whether that's an old video or podcast episode, and showcase it it again. I highly doubt that anyone in your audience will remember, and even if they do, they're not gonna care. I promise you. You can repurpose this content into multiple formats. You can take a blog post, turn it into a video. You can take a video, turn it into a podcast episode. You can take any of your content, quite frankly, and turn it into social media updates. And all of this will save you time and effort while providing a ton of value to your audience across those various channels.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:11:01]:
Now I don't want you to forget about your promotional calendar in the summer. Even though you may be working reduced hours, going on vacation, you can still schedule a summer flash sale or have some visibility promotions in place. You wanna make sure that you're always focused on audience building, whether that's participating in a bundle, speaking in a summit, doing a freebie spot swap with one of your peers, any type of odd, you know, visibility type promotions, you still want to have those in place over the summer. And I don't want you to forget about affiliate marketing this summer. This can be a great way to tap into cash and get a revenue stream where you don't have to deliver the product or service. Now to help you with this over the summer, like I said, I want to share my super simple Google Sheet that I use to plan out my email newsletter, any affiliate promotions. I use it to track visibility collaborations that I'm a part of and making sure that I'm appropriately promoting them. I use it for the flash sale.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:12:14]:
And if you want to grab it, I'm gonna put the link in the show notes. I want to forewarn you because it's super, super simple, but it works for me. And I'll go take just one second and go over with you what I'm referring to. So in this Google Sheet, I have a column that basically lists out anything that I'm promoting that week for my email newsletter. So it might be a visibility collaboration that I'm doing, an affiliate promo that I'm doing. Could be one of my own programs or courses. It could be any flash sales that I'm doing. So I have a column for that, and that's what I use to track everything that I'm promoting in my business.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:12:59]:
So that column is very, very important. The other thing I just wanna say there is it is also a way for me to track anything that I've committed to. So if I am speaking at a summit, I'm participating in a bundle, and, obviously, I need to help promote those. I will put those in this column to make sure that I am, you know, promoting them like I committed to, but also tracking it. Now in the next column is where I plan out my content. So I'm doing podcasts. You might be doing YouTube videos or blogs or whatever. So in that column is column c in the spreadsheet.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:13:41]:
That is where I put my content title. And a lot of times, that will tie into what I'm promoting that week. And then I have a lot of different sections in my newsletter, and I'll give you some examples here from my HobbyScool newsletter. So the next section in my newsletter in HobbyScool, I promote upcoming workshops and events. And I have a, you know, a section set up in the newsletter, and that's where I pop all of that into. So it might be one of the events that we are doing, but it also might be something that I am promoting as an affiliate. So I think in the last email newsletter that I sent out for HobbyScool, we were promoting a webinar for somebody, and we were also promoting an upcoming summit. So that's what I put in that section.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:14:37]:
So I plan that out in this particular spreadsheet. Going on to the next section in my newsletter is called featured product products. So that might be something that we are promoting as a an affiliate, but it also might be one of our products that we're promoting and maybe sending some sending our audience to our Shopify store. And then in section 3 in the newsletter, it for HobbyScool is called get creative, this week's prompt. So in that particular section, a lot of times what we're doing there, if we're working with any type of sponsor, we might send them to one of their blog posts or their YouTube videos or maybe even a podcast episode, or it just may be one of our past speakers that, you know, they have great content, and we want to promote them no matter what. So we'll promote them in that section of the newsletter. And then in the next one is where we, kinda point our audience in our email to somewhere on social media. A lot of times, it's the Facebook group for HobbyScool, but it could be Instagram or or somewhere else that we're pointing them.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:15:47]:
So we have a section there where we kinda highlight what we're doing on social media, and that's a really, really great way to get engagement on our social media posts. So a lot of times, what I try to do, and this doesn't always work out, but a lot of times what I try to do is post that on social media right before we send out our newsletter. When we send out our newsletter, we're driving people to that social media post that really, you know, kinda drives up the engagement. So it kinda points to or helps the algorithm say, oh, this is a really, really great post. I'm gonna show it to more people. So that has helped us tremendously, and I'm actually gonna incorporate that strategy a little bit more in my other brands. And then, the next one could be how to work with me, where you're directing people on how to work with you. And there's other things that we have in the spreadsheet.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:16:43]:
There's a place in here where you can put the email the link to your particular, email. So, like, in ConvertKit, they will give you a specific link for that if you have published it, to to the web. I love doing love that feature. I love tracking that. You can also track your number of email subscribers that that particular email went out to, the email responses, the open rate, click weight click rate, and number of clicks. So I hope you enjoy this super, super simple Google Sheet to plan out your email newsletters. It's definitely helped us in our business, and you could use that to plan out your content this summer. So kind of going back to our episode here, I really want to end and just emphasize that consistent marketing and audience engagement should stay a priority with you throughout the summer.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:17:43]:
And I know a lot of us me, I'm a put me in this bucket too. I know a lot of us will be tempted to take a break and just say, oh, I don't need to send that email this week. But maintaining a consistent presence is crucial for nurturing your audience and staying top of their mind, so that when you are ready to sell to them in the fall, they will remember you and know exactly how you can help them. So don't forget to focus on those audience growth strategies that I mentioned to you this summer, whether that's participating in bundles, speaking at summits, doing a freebie swap with a peer, visibility initiatives should always be a priority throughout the year. And you can even schedule promoting these initiatives like I've just walked you through how I do that with my super simple Google Sheet. You can do that with your marketing automation. So just to summarize, to help you streamline your digital product business this year for the summer, you need to focus on outsourcing where you can, automating your marketing and batching your content production, or even repurposing your existing content. So by implementing everything that we talked about, these streamlining strategies and growth initiatives, you will not only optimize your operations for the summer months, but you're gonna set the stage for a strong finish to the year.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:19:16]:
So as the fall season approaches and when we're getting ready to go back to school, you, my friend, are gonna be well positioned to capitalize on the momentum you have built, launching any new products or services that you want to launch in the fall and continue to drive your digital product business forward. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and you will have to either email me back or contact me on social media. You can DM me on Instagram @destinicopp. I would love to know what you are doing this summer to streamline your digital product business. Bye for now.