You think of summer and you think of sunshine and vacation time. The pace might be a little slower around the office. Email autoresponders are reminding you that people are away. You might be wondering if you should scale back on your marketing efforts as they might not be as effective. Please don’t.
Operations don’t stop in the summer. Neither does product development. And sales definitely doesn’t scale back. Marketing shouldn’t either. It’s just as important to maintain your marketing momentum in the summer as it is during any season. Here’s why:
1. The life sciences buy cycle doesn’t take vacation. The buy cycle never stops cycling. Some customers might be in the early stages of research and needs analysis. Others might be evaluating and comparing purchase options. If you stop nurturing your leads or offering valuable content during the summer, you’re basically bowing out of your customers’ buy cycle. The result is that customers can and will forget about you.
2. Competitors will take your place. If you scale back marketing during summer, savvy competitors will step up and fill the void you created. They’ll be the ones reaching out to your customers and providing a consistent stream of valuable content to help them along their buying journey.
3. You must keep the pipeline filled. Depending on the length of your customers’ buy cycle, summer is the time of year when you fill the pipeline with leads that can boost fourth quarter revenues. That means you must maintain a consistent and persistent presence during the summer months to connect with future buyers.
4. You’ll miss connecting with the vast majority of your audience. There are nine weeks in the summer season of July and August. If every researcher takes a summer vacation (not all do), that averages out to 11% of your audience being on vacation in any given week. If you scale back on marketing, the 89% of your target audience that is still working won’t be exposed to your message. It’s definitely not worth it.
5. Customer needs pop up in summer. This is the season for setting up new or upgrading existing labs, kicking off independent research projects, and hiring summer interns who need equipment, among other activities. If you continue summer marketing, your customers will keep you top of mind and are more likely to turn to you for support.
6. Summer leads can be high quality. The life sciences researcher that’s busy sourcing and specifying products and gathering information during the summer tends to be motivated and engaged. A big potential driver for this in the U.S is the NIH fiscal calendar, which runs from Oct. 1 - Sept. 30. Summer is the perfect opportunity for you to have productive conversations with customers and prospects—especially if they are figuring out how to spend any potential excess grant money.
7. You created an editorial calendar for a reason. Content marketing is the engine of life sciences marketing, and content takes time to produce. That’s one of the reasons why marketers plan out their content campaigns in and advance and publish an editorial calendar to guide them. Chances are, you didn’t leave the summer blank. So if you slow down now, you’re messing up the whole plan.
8. Customers are always connected. Even during vacation, more and more life sciences researchers are staying connected to work in order to keep projects moving along. Many of them might take an hour out of their down time to attend a webinar or watch a few instructional videos. Others take along a work version of summer reading to stay up-to-date on recent news, industry trends, hot new products and other information they seek, but may not have time to catch up on during hectic days in the office. This is a good time to send out valuable content, such as a key white paper or important article, maybe even labeled “Summer Reading.”