Travelers and locals alike are flocking to your business and enjoying the experiences you offer. Business is booming, and you’re spending every minute of the day ensuring that your tours or activities are running smoothly. 

When things are going well and you’re extremely busy, you might be tempted to scale back your marketing efforts. After all, you’ve already achieved the goal: increased business. But if you want to keep the good fortune flowing into the future, you need to keep your marketing efforts going. 

Keep reading to learn why and how to continue your marketing campaigns when your business is at its busiest. 

Why Invest In Marketing If It Already Worked?

Think of the advertising campaigns that you know by heart — the McDonald’s jingle, the Nike slogan, the State Farm tune… What do they all have in common? These brands are constantly advertised to you on television and other media, so they stick in your memory. 

Studies have found that when it comes to advertising, our memory tends to be short-term. This is why brands need to repeat their messaging constantly, helping consumers store and recall those memories when needed. If you want to stay top of mind for your potential customers, you need to regularly market to them. 

The main reason to continue marketing when your business is busier than ever is to set yourself up for success in the future. The business you’re enjoying now is a product of all the customer acquisition work you’ve done in the past months. If you want that to keep those new customers coming, it only makes sense to continue marketing. You never know when leaner times could be on the horizon, so you want to take full advantage of your current success.

Lastly, if you’re not marketing to your target audience, someone else will. For example, if you stop running your PPC ads, your competitors could climb up the rankings and take your current spot in the SERP, and all the business you’ve been enjoying could suddenly dry up. Users typically need to encounter your brand multiple times before deciding to do business with you, and scaling back your marketing efforts during a crucial time could lead to them forgetting your business – and booking with your competition. 

How to Keep Marketing Campaigns Going When You’re Busy 

Automation Is Key 

If you have a small staff and everyone is wearing many hats, marketing can quickly become overwhelming, especially when you’re at your busiest. Automating as many processes as possible will help you stay on top of all your marketing tasks with minimal effort. Here are a few things that you can set to cruise control:

• Data Transfers: Automation tools like Zapier can help you streamline data transfers and take certain tasks off your plate, such as creating invoices or online sales receipts when new bookings come in. 
• Email Campaigns: Email is a crucial tool when it comes to staying in touch with customers. However, it can take a lot of time to manually update email segments when new customers make a booking or subscribe to a newsletter. Using automation tools like Zapier, you can update your email segments and enroll new customers in lifecycle email campaigns. 
• PPC Ads: Don’t have time to constantly refine your PPC ads? If you’re running Google Ads, take advantage of their Smart Bidding tool, which takes some of the work out of your hands by using machine learning to optimize your ads. If you’re running Facebook Ads, you can use rules to automate different aspects of your campaigns. For example, you can create a rule that tells Facebook to increase your bids and budget when your cost per conversion is low, or a rule that turns off your ad sets when conversion costs are higher than you’re willing to spend. (Read Neil Patel’s article on how to set up ad rules.)

Use Slow Periods Wisely

When business begins to slow down, use this time to prepare for the next boom. Work on strategy and content creation so your marketing campaigns will be set up and ready to continue on their own when it gets busy again. Some areas to focus on include: 

• Digital Marketing Strategy: Build out your digital marketing strategy for the coming year, taking the time to set goals and objectives, analyze top-performing channels, and set a budget. 
• Content Calendar: Your marketing strategy will inform the types of content you need to create, whether it’s evergreen blog posts, new pages on your website, ads for Google and social media, and beyond. Slot all your content into a calendar for the coming year and get everything drafted before your busiest time of year begins. That way you don’t have to worry about finding time to write a blog post or ad when business starts streaming in. 
• Social Media: You can’t exactly set it and forget it when it comes to social media. Your profiles will require regular monitoring. However, you can vastly reduce the workload by scheduling out any evergreen social posts and campaigns. Use a social media scheduling tool to help you manage your social media accounts and plan your future posts. Once the busy season rolls around, you just need to stay on top of responding to messages and comments while your posts appear right on schedule — almost like magic! 

Maintaining your marketing efforts when you’re busy is easier than you think. It just requires some planning and a few tools that help simplify processes. Want to be extra prepared for the next wave of business? Check out our marketing and SEO busy season checklist.