Summer Advertising Ideas To Help Your Business Grow

When is the best time to kick off your summer advertising campaign? If you want to know the top methods to take advantage of the remaining summer days, read this article.

Every summer, companies start to think of ideas to grow their business and not let the great weather ruin their profits. 

Maybe you have already considered running summer advertising competitions, hotel specials, or online shopping discounts. 

Pro Tip: You can never start too early. Now is the moment to get a jump start on the competition. To maximize your profit from this summer’s sales, it’s important to be aware of the developing trends in digital advertising.

Let’s go over some hot tips you can use in your summer advertising strategy to increase sales this holiday season.

• Create your summer advertising plan.

The summer holidays will serve as the cornerstone of your marketing efforts. This is why it’s important to have a strategy in place.

It’s best practice to begin planning your marketing strategy two weeks to a month before each holiday.

Some stores, for instance, celebrate Labor Day with a week-long deal. Find out what your competitors are doing for the holidays. You can then start your campaign a week early and extend it for as long as they are.

For instance, you could consider offering sales and promotions to your American customers around the time of Labor Day. 

You should also be aware of the holidays that your international customers celebrate. This will help you organise more tailored content. Customized advertising is great for acquiring the right new customers. 

There are many things to do and see this summer. Luckily, there is never a shortage of “national days.” Some have a very serious nature, while others seem completely absurd. 

Here are some holiday examples you could take advantage of this summer: 

• International Joke Day; 
• National Ice Cream Day; 
• World Elephant Day;
• National Lasagna Day; 
• Friendship Day;

Did you know you can use 24SevenSocial Ads to easily manage your summer advertising and succeed with Facebook and Instagram ads? 

Yes, this is not a joke! With Ads by 24SevenSocial, you can easily choose the right settings, audience, and creatives for your ads. You can manage all the pixels and edit your creatives to fit each placement perfectly. This ensures the best performance for your ads. All of this and more can be done from our user-friendly and consistent interface. Read until the end of the article to find out how to easily set, manage, optimize, and analyze your ads via 24SevenSocial. 

Here is another method to boost your summer advertising this year. 

• Take advantage of video marketing.

Any business that wants to “make a splash” this summer should embrace video marketing. For those who have yet to begin using this method, video marketing is here to stay, so get on board as soon as possible. 

First, decide what it is you want to promote this summer. Then start working on a video that will convince your followers to share it. Video marketing may be used for a wide variety of purposes, from expanding brand awareness to promoting specials and discounts. 

If you have a summer sale, promotion, or event coming up, video marketing is a great way to get the word out. You are also able to educate prospective customers on your product or service. 

As the use of videos in digital marketing grows, so does the opportunity to put your creativity and knowledge out there. Enjoy the weather and add video marketing to your summer advertising plan.

• Organize a summer competition

Do not feel ignored while your clients enjoy the summer weather. Instead, run a social media contest to entice them back and reach new customers.

Contests do a lot more than just bring more people to a website and make more money during the slower summer months. They are a “gold mine” for companies looking to increase their user-generated content. Furthermore, consumers feel that user-generated content (UGC) has a significant impact on their purchase decisions. 

An example of user-generated content is photo competitions. They are a great marketing tool for stores that offer seasonal products (i.e., retailers).

• Make your brand “smell of summer”. 

Each season has its own distinct style.

This is why Christmas commercials usually feature snow and cosy fireplaces instead of sandy beaches and palm trees.

Similarly, it goes the same way for the summer season. 

This means your branding should be aligned with how customers are feeling. Thus, many companies update their social media profiles as well as landing pages.

We understand that it is not always possible to change your site, but social media is almost a must. This shows that you are agile. Furthermore, you want to provide your customers with this “summery” way of thinking about your brand.

🗝 Key Takeaways 🗝

Although half the year has already passed, you still have time to get your summer content jazzed up. Don’t put off thinking about when and how you’ll market your company in the next few months. Start doing so right now. These suggestions should be kept in mind while you make preparations:

• Use historical consumer purchasing patterns as a basis for your summer marketing strategies.
• Tweak and personalize your summer advertising campaigns.

As promised, here is a quick tutorial on how 24SevenSocial Ads can help your summer advertising game. 

Step 1: Navigate to Ads and click the “Create Ads” button on the top right-hand side of your dashboard.

Alternatively, you can use the “Create Ads” option on the left-hand side of your Dashboard.

When you click the big button to start making your campaign, you are given the following choices:

• You will see your account name. If you have more than one, you will be able to see them all in the drop-down menu. 
• Once you select the correct account, you need to input your campaign’s name.
• You then have a dropdown menu to state whether you are using a special ad category ( this is housing, credit, or employment-this is applicable if you are about to run ads in the US). At the moment we are not, so we will leave the default choice-None. 

Step 2: Determine the best campaign objectives.

Choosing the best campaign objective for your current goals is essential. Let’s take a quick look at all the options that you have: 

1. We have App Promotion, which are ads specifically made to promote your app and encourage people to download and install it.
2. Then there is Awareness. This objective combines the previous ones known as”Brand awareness”, “Reach”, “Video views” and “Store traffic”. Using awareness will help you “reach the largest number of people who are most likely to remember your ad”.
3. We have Engagement, which will help you find people online who are more likely to interact with your business, send you a message, or do what you require of them on your ad or Page. This objective combines a few of the previous ones: “Engagement”, “Video views”, “Messages”, and “Conversions”.
4. Traffic is the same as it was before. You need to choose this campaign objective if you need to drive more people to your website.
5. Lastly,  we have Sales. It combines the objectives we previously knew as “Conversions” and “Catalogue sales”. You can use this objective to find people who are likely to buy your products or services. For example, you can use the sales objective to reach people who are most likely to buy from your e-commerce site.

Now that we know what each objective is about, let’s say we would like to create a Traffic campaign. Simply select Traffic as your campaign objective and click on “Next.” 

Step 3: Create your ad. 

Once you have selected your campaign objective, you will be presented with a brief summary of your settings. You can change the name of your campaign, create new ads, or use an existing post to promote.

For this example, we will create a new ad. We can now see the overview of the campaign we are creating and need to ensure we have the correct Facebook and, if applicable, an Instagram account selected. For this example, we will only be using our Facebook page. But just to clarify that Instagram is a placement, as long as your IG account is connected to your ad account, it will be visible in the field. So what we are doing at the moment will be absolutely the same if we add an IG account and run a campaign with a slightly different objective.

Next, let’s add our image and ad copy. Keep in mind that when you enter the link you want your ads to lead to, you can simply change the auto-generated image to your desired one.

Because we designed 24SevenSocial Ads as an easy-to-use and intuitive tool, you are able to clearly see, in real-time, what your ad will look like on a variety of different placements like desktop, mobile, Instagram, and so on. 

You are also able to easily edit your images in the free editor tool. This way, you will be sure that your ads will be top-notch. 

Once you are happy with the copy and image, you can select your desired call to action button (CTA) from the dropdown menu. In our case, we have selected “Learn More”. Awesome! We now have our great-looking, edited image and perfect ad copy. 

We are ready to move on to the best and most interesting part of your campaign set-up:

👉 Target Group  

Getting your targeting right is key to the success of your Facebook ad campaign. 

So what do we have here? 

1. We need to create a brand new target group that we can give a name to, so it is easier to find if we decide to use it again. In our case, we will name it “Emma’s 1st Target Group”. We have the option to not save this target group, but we recommend saving it as it may be useful at some point in your advertising lifecycle.

2. We then have our location. Depending on what your business does, you may benefit from different location targeting options. If you are a local business, like our bakery, and mainly have people visiting your business, we suggest starting off with a narrower target—something local within a few miles of your address. We are located in London, so we will put that plus a 10-mile radius. After we choose our location and radius for it, there are a few more options.
   We can select the location types by:

• “Home”: this means targeting people living in the location; 
• “Recent”: people who have recently been in this location;
• “Travel in”: people who are travelling or just visiting our chosen location; 

We will choose Home and Recent as this works well for our targeting. 

3. There is the option to exclude any locations where we don’t want our ads to be shown. We can even select a specific ZIP code just to ensure our ads are well-targeted. Let’s leave this blank at the moment as we do not have enough data to see where we don’t need people from.

4. After the location and audience definitions come the age of our target group. You have the option to target 13–65+-year-olds. For our example, we know that we want our target quite broad as our bakery’s main customers are 18 to 65+-year-olds. We will select both males and females. The language setting will be set to English (UK), but you can choose any of the multiple languages available in the dropdown menu. We are also able to add interest to make our broad ads slightly more targeted. 

For your convenience, we also added a few tips to help you best identify the audience that best suits your business. 

You are also able to see, in real-time, the estimate of the number of people you can reach through the audience definition available in your target group.

If you want to get really specific about your target audience, you can click on the “more targeting options” toggle, where you will be presented with a lot of different options. You can select people with specific relationship statuses, demographics, employers, and so on. We love digging into this option as it’s really simple to use but extremely helpful for your summer advertising campaigns. 

Last but not least, you have your ad bidding and placement options. 

This is also a very important part of running successful advertising campaigns.

1. The first part is the bidding options: You can decide whether you want your campaign to use Facebook’s campaign budget optimization, which, in simple terms, gives Facebook the power to distribute your budget towards the different ad sets in your campaign based on what the algorithm believes works best. Alternatively, you can manually choose your lifetime or daily budget. We will choose the latter. 
2. We have set a lifetime budget of 100 euros. Here we have the option to choose between daily and lifetime budgets—a daily budget is what you spend per day, and a lifetime budget is what you want to spend as a total for the whole campaign. 
3. We then have a period and a schedule that we want to set for our campaign. In our case, we want our ads to run from July 1 until July 18th with no specific schedule. 
4. We can also choose our delivery type to either be Standard (which means the ads are entered into the auction using a standard or capped bid) or Accelerated (which means that your ads may be entered into the auction at maximum bids). Keep in mind that this can exhaust your budget quite quickly. In our case, we will be using the standard delivery type.

Once we are happy with the budgeting, we can move on to the ad placement options. Here you also have the choice to select any placements that best suit your purpose. 

If you feel ready with your campaign set up, you can go ahead and click on “Next.”

As you can see, you have a few other options:
1. You can cancel everything and start over.
2. Save your work as a draft to revisit it at a later stage.
3. You can send the campaign for review to your manager or colleague. 

After you click Next, you will see a summary of your campaign like so:

You also have more advanced publishing options, such as splitting criteria (by age, location, gender, etc.) and choosing your Facebook pixel to track the progress of your whole campaign. We also specifically created a function called Cruise Control to automatically turn off or pause your campaign based on your specifically selected triggers.

This is how easy it is to set your campaigns for success with 24SevenSocial Ads. 

Don’t forget to claim your free 14-day trial today. Show your business to the world and build the greatest summer advertising campaign.