Here are the five simple steps you can follow to create effective sales and marketing ideas that will help you grow your online business. This article will give you some tips for coming up with ideas for spring and summer promotions and create an implementation plan. 

You will receive a five step process for getting your next promotion prepped and ready to go.

Spring and Summer Marketing Ideas

There are lots of reasons and ways to promote your business for the coming summer months.  But the first place to start is with your niche. Even if your niche isn't related to spring or summer in any way, read on. 

Sales promotions provide your audience with things like better pricing, a fun, unique experience or a handsome premium.  Don't underestimate the power for a premium (freebie).

And keep in mind that promotions are not used to give out junk. They exist to provide value to customers and potential customers, while boosting product sales. 

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If you stick with your existing inventory, you might want to launch a campaign around a specific holiday, store anniversary, or another event that ties in with your niche.

Here are a few summer marketing ideas that can start you thinking of things you can take action on:

• Think about promotions designed to help consumers to win with whatever your business helps them with.
• At a minimum, think of something you can provide to your audience for nothing, because everybody loves getting a free resource or product!For example a free gift for every referral.
• Brainstorm with your team to come up with ideas that will help those in your niche make a summer transformation.
  

It's an opportunity to look at your current inventory to see which products you will include. The big question is, will you use existing inventory or will you need to create something new.

• Discounted pricing
  
• Joint promotion with a complimentary business
• Voucher or coupon with purchase
• Buy one get one free deal (BOGO)
• Double the points if you have a loyalty program
• You might also think of bundling related products together.
  

Make it more advantageous to buy the bundles versus buying items individually. You can make the bundles available for a certain time, like a holiday or special event that you're participating in during the summer.

• Create a summer specific coupon or discount code that runs for a specific time frame.
  
• Announce a new summer collection or product line that you can build a campaign around.
  
• Maybe you launch a promotion around things that happen during the summer.
  

Maybe you do a little of both, announce a new product line to celebrate a particular holiday or season, like the change from Spring to Summer.

For example, school is out, students are graduating, it's summer vacation time, backyard barbecues and beaches become popular again and so much more.  

Once you have an idea, here are a few ways that you can organize your campaigns.

1. Set Goals

Set SMART goals for your summer marketing campaign. That means it should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.

Select the holidays, observances and life events you want to promote. Does your product tie in with upcoming holidays? If so great. If not, you can still offer a deal, sale, discount, freebie.

Think about your local auto dealerships, furniture and grocery stores. There is always a "President's Day" sale or some other sale that commemorates a holiday, even though their products have nothing to do with the holiday. 

Keeping the acronym for SMART goals in mind, your high level goals could involve something similar to the following: 

Once you decide what your goals are, determine the steps you will take to reach your goals. Write out the steps you'll take to get the results you're looking for.

It doesn't have to be a novel idea or detailed plan, but get the main ideas on paper so that you can review them after the promotion is over.

2. Get Your Promotion on the Calendar

Pick a time frame for your promotion. Maybe you want to run your promotion in stages. How often will you email your list, or post on social media during your promotion? 

Will you run one summer promotion or many? Make sure your plans are realistic, and something you can actually accomplish.

Put your entire promotion on the calendar. 

3. Create Your Visuals

For people who have never heard of your business, create content that educates them about what you do. You can do this quickly using images and videos.

Create short tutorials and educational pieces. Make sure the educational pages have a call to action that sends potential customers to a sales or product page. 

Sales and landing pages. Use sales and landing pages that will quickly help your ideal customers know what they need to know to make a purchase. 

If you don't know how or don't have time to use these products, hire a graphic designer on Fiverr to create them for you. You can also use templates like the ones shown to create easy promotions. 

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4. Schedule Your Promotion

This is where your promotion goes live. It's scheduled out during the time frame you selected during step 2, and you're hopefully using tools like MailChimp, aWeber, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Canva, Tailwind, Buffer and more to automate getting your marketing messages out to your audience. 

You'll want to use social media, email marketing, live broadcasts, video marketing, podcasts, blog posts and more to get the word out about about your summer marketing campaign.  

Sitting online all day posting is not the best use of your time. While posting on social about your summer marketing campaign is important, you could be spending your time doing other more lucrative activities or spending time with the people who matter most. 

There are tools that works to automate social media posting for you. You can use these tools to actually plan and schedule your posting.

I normally plan what I want to say, I choose my images and set up my posts for a week and then move on to other activities.That doesn't mean that I can't post spontaneously or go live during the week, it means that I have an inventory of planned posts that I'm using to get a specific result (lead generation, awareness, sales, etc.) that will get the attention of my audience. 

If I have a free moment during the week when I want to post out something spontaneous, I can do that. But I'm not pressed to post stuff out at random. 

These tools also give me data that I can use to see whether my promotions were effective. If I need to make adjustments, I can do so at any time.

Check out our article on how to automate social posting for detailed information and affordable tools.

5. Measure Your Results

Last but not least, you can check out your WooCommerce, Etsy or Shopify analytics to see how many products you sold during your promotion. This will also shed light on the products that sold and where your traffic came from.

If you keep track of your data, over time you will have more and more information you can use to make informed decisions on the products, pages, images and blog content that is working well for your business.

You will be able to skip the stuff that doesn't work, and incorporate more of the things that are working so that you can grow and reach your goals. 

If you aren't sure how to set these analytics programs up, you can hire top Fiverr sellers that specialize in Google Analytics and more.

A Resource for Your Next Promotion

Here is a resource I've use to promote my business and one you can use to promote your business this summer and all year long. 

Summary

Creating structured promotions is a way to consistently get your business out to your audience on a regular basis. It's will also help you make better business decisions with the data you'll collect.

Creating a promotion using this process will help you learn more about what works with your audience and continually improve by measuring your results.