When Summer Business Slows Down, What Should Your Content Do?

Summer can be such a strange season in business, because in general a lot of things slow down around you – millions book time off for holidays or childcare, and a lot of plans, progress and networking gets put on hold for August for that very reason. And within that overall slowed-down context, summer can look very different for each business owner – some get a pleasant lull in the incoming enquiries and ongoing deliveries, but others face six weeks of means juggling work with childcare, holidays, and the general unpredictability of everyone else’s routine changing too. So whatever you’re facing with this change of pace, what can you do to make life a bit easier where your summer business content’s concerned?

The first point I’d make is that you can definitely give yourself permission to stop pushing ahead at full speed. It might feel tempting to take advantage of the quieter online spaces, creating more posts, and keeping up that visibility. But summer does not always reward that approach. When your own capacity is lower, and your audience may also be away or just not as locked into business mode as usual, the most effective content strategy will be the one that adapts to those conditions rather than forcing it.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

If you’re one of those business owners feeling the strain this summer, juggling more than you’re used to, then now is the time to take some of that new content creation off your plate. Start by looking back at some oldies but goodies that you haven’t revisited for a while – dust them off and reissue, rather than coming up with something new. Turn an old blog post into a new value email, or serialise it across several social media posts. Pick something that went down well previously, make sure it’s up to date for your audience today, and run with it again – there’s a reason it went down well last time, so don’t hesitate to bring it out again, and make life a little easier for yourself.

You might also find it interesting to have a sneaky sideways look at how other businesses are behaving. Many companies naturally slow down over summer, because they also know that their audience is distracted with other things, and they’re not working at usual capacity either. If you are used to a busy, noisy market with lots of response and engagement, that can feel a bit unsettling, but it can also be freeing. Just make sure that your content is useful, relevant, and easy to remember – that’s what will make you stand out.

What Could that Look Like?

Simple content that’s easy to digest and act on could be something reflective that helps people to think differently, or perhaps a short and practical guide to doing something beneficial – things that don’t demand too much time and energy, but will still be useful and stick in the mind. This is not the season for the hard sell (unless you’ve got a load of aircon units to shift – they seem to be going like hotcakes at the moment!).

If your content can acknowledges the reality of this strange few weeks, it will build trust really quickly too, because it feels human rather than driven by business-as-usual.

Give Yourself a Summer Break Too

Summer is a very different time for business, so you really don’t need to feel the pressure to keep that momentum the same as normal. Make allowances for yourself and for your audience, and stick to what works – content from your own expertise, that meets your readers where they are too. Summer is strange, but those basic marketing principles remain: be yourself, be relevant and useful, and don’t keep your foot on the hard-sell accelerator all the time. Give yourself a little summer break too.  Life and work do not always move neatly and evenly together, and adjusting your summer business content to match is exactly what will make it effective for you.

And here’s a little something more that I put out last year – some guidance on how to write your words a bit differently during the summer as well: Changing the Pace of your Words in the Summer Slowdown