EP. 19: GET SET FOR SUMMER - 3 things you need to know about September

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What’s this episode about?

The third and final episode of the Get Set for Summer series! In this episode I share both my own and my clients experience of September, and how it can be a key indicator for the rest of the year.

It might feel too early start thinking about September but, as I explain in the episode, a strong September is really key for both ecom and service based businesses.

In this episode I cover:

1) My number 1 tip that I recommend to have the BEST start to September.

2) How to work out what you need to be focusing on in the first few weeks after the school holidays

3) Why the P.M.T Approach (focusing on the right people, with the right message, at the right time) is even more important in the period from Sept - Jan.

BUT

If you are thinking that you really need someone to just sit you down and help you get it done, you are in luck!

I’ll be announcing the workshop this week, click here to sign up to the wait list and you get first access to tickets (and a cheeky little bonus!)

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Read the transcript:

NOTE: This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool. Please forgive any typos or errors. Hello, and welcome to growing pains. The marketing podcast for parent and baby brands who want to grow and get more consistent sales, but without the overwhelm of feeling like you have to be online 24 7, I'm Sophie, your host, and a Facebook and Instagram ad strategist who specializes in parent and baby brands as well as a mom of two. Join me each week as I alongside some wonderful guests, she had practical tips and advice about how you can use and combine marketing strategies to get more impact for your effort. Hello, and welcome to the third in that there's many series or about getting ready for summer. If you haven't listened to the last two episodes, I'd really encourage you to go back and do that. We cover all about planning for summer, making sure that you know what you're doing. What's your non-negotiables, what are the things that you can drop? And then also what you can automate. So making sure that you've got yourself set up so you can have more time over [00:01:00] the summer, either for yourself while you go on holiday, or if you want some time with the kids while they're. Offer school. So make sure you go back and listen to those two episodes. If you haven't. Now, in this third episode, we are going to be talking all about September and the three things I really want you to know about September. Both from my own personal experience and also from working with clients as well. So let's jump into it. Now, the first thing that I really want to impress him on you, and this is something I really do need to take my own advice on. So the kids go back to school. I imagine most kids will be going back around like the 5th of September. Block a few days out in your diary. Now, the, I think the natural instinct is to like jump back into it. Right. You might have had really restricted time over the summer. You've got to do less, like as long as your arm that has been sitting there for probably like a month that you haven't quite managed to get round to. I love September as well. For me, it's a really it's a good energy time of year. For me. It feels like new year. [00:02:00] Like I know it's the new school year, not the new calendar year, but for me, it always feels like that real fresh energy. I absolutely love it. And so I'm like, I'm ready to jump in and do all the things. Actually I have learned over the last five years that after school holidays, it really does. Do you mean? Well, to take a couple of days. Before I jumped straight back in now, sometimes I will literally take days off as in, I will take the Monday, Tuesday out of the business and just kind of decompressing and having time for myself. Other times I will just not book any meetings and I will maybe slowly work through my, to do list. Do some planning kind of make sure that I just feel ready to kind of get started and go back into the air, like with a clear mind. So, if you only take one thing from this episode. It would be when you're thinking about coming back after September, even if it's one day, if that's all you can bear to give yourself. Because I do know the feeling like you just want to kind of get back to it. Just give yourself that one day. Okay. Really, really does make a difference. Right now we've got that out of the way, the [00:03:00] second thing I want you to know about September is it is all about communicating with your warm customers. So depending on what your focus has been, and we talked about this in the last couple of episodes, what we were focused. Over summer. So depending on what that's been, it will depend on what your kind of September plan looks like. If you like, I did apologize if you can hear traffic noise in the background is because I'm actually recording this episode. Up in my bedroom, which is a bit noisier than where I normally record. But the, my whole family are downstairs, so this is the only place to record it. So apologies if the noise is a bit distracting in this episode, it's distracting me. But I keep trying to stop. So that I'd have to edit it all out and I'm just taking forever to record. So I'm just going to plow on through. And I'll apologize if you can hear any traffic noise. Okay, so back to it. . So we talked to last episode about three core goals over summer. Either you want to maintain or grow sales. You want to warm up your audience ready for September, or you want to stop your business completely over summer. So, if you were looking to grow a maintain sales, actually [00:04:00] you probably doing all of the things. And it might be just picking up anything that has been put on hold or kind of dialing things up, maybe if you've been sending one email, could you look at start sending two emails? Like really? You're just looking at a great strategy there to build on what you've already done over summer. The second, one's a warming your audience up for September. It's like, this is your go time. So if you spent the summer. Keeping people warm, you making sure you're on social media, making sure you're sending weekly emails to your list, making sure that people don't forget who you are, you hit September. And really that's when you need to have a plan about how you're going to then convert those warm potential clients. Into customers that might be with an offer that might be with a workshop where you then convert people that might be where that email strategy or a live video strategy. Whatever it is. It's all about communicating with your clients or customers and making sure they know that you're there. So if you've been warming people up, I'd really, really urge [00:05:00] you to make sure you have a strong plan to then convert them in September, October. To make sure that all of your work over summer was worthwhile so definitely at that point, look at, get making sure you've got a plan in place and getting some support to make sure you make the most of all of those sales. The third one is if you sort of shut your business And decided to have the whole summer off, which is amazing. You're going to need to ramp your business back up. So anything you did to shut it down. So closing off the website. Putting banners on the website your out of office on your email.. Posts on your social media, anything that you did to tell customers that you're going to be stopping over summer. Make sure you think go through reverse all of those things. And you need to get back to doing those posts as well. So make sure everyone knows that you're back. You need to be getting on social media, really strong social media strategy for the first couple of weeks, at least to make sure you get the algorithm back in your favor and get back in front of those clients. Make sure you're in your clients and customers inboxes. Two or three times a week, ideally, you need to make sure [00:06:00] they remember that you are there. It will even help even more. If you've got a strong offer to come back with, get them back on the website. If you've done ads before I would get those ads going as well, if you haven't done ads before, it might not be quite the right time to be trying something completely new while you're trying to do all those other things as well. But once you've got those other things up and running definitely ads could be something you could think about in terms of ramping the business up. So if you've closed the business off, you definitely need to come back with a really, really strong strategy to make sure that you're not impacted for the rest of the year. Both kind of taking the summer off. So that would be my second thing to think about with September, depending on your goal and what you've done over summer. And even if you started out with one goal and ended up with another, like maybe you thought you're going to go for sales, and then you actually decided just to warm your audience up, or you thought you were going to try and be present and keep everything warm, but actually you kind of closed your business. It's absolutely fine. Like whatever happened, just come back in September and make sure that you don't let it impact the rest of your year. [00:07:00] And the third thing I want to talk about today that you really need to know about September is that. September to December. It's a really unique period. And actually this is where I'm going to split out e-com and lead gen. Because I think it's really important to distinguish here about the kind of different patterns that there are. So I'll just talk about econ for a few minutes to get started. Now the general pattern of econ from September through to December is separately from an. Facebook ads perspective, but also just from organic as well. And kind of knowing what your customers are doing and thinking. So way back at the beginning, my one of my first episodes was about the PMT approach, which is that you need to be talking to the right people with the right message at the right time. And that is never more true than from September to December, because there's so much going on. The people that you're speaking to, the messages we're giving them. And when you're giving them becomes so important, it is such a busy time. So you hit September. [00:08:00] Everyone should be a bit more present compared to August. We should be back in a bit more of a buying mode and people are starting to get back into the habit of buying, which is really good. And to make the most of that. Then we start get through to the end of September into October and you get into half term, Halloween bonfire night. Some of those things will be relevant to your actual business. Some of those things will just be a distraction for your customers. So it might be that it's completely irrelevant that it's bonfire night, but it might be that your customers kind of are a bit distracted by it. And therefore your sales are impacted. So you just need to think about. What your clients and customers are thinking about during those times. So you've got half term bonfire night, Halloween. Then the next month in November, you've got black Friday, really big for e-com. Now I did a whole Christmas series last year, and I'll probably do it again this year. So we'll delve into that a lot more, but really the key here for black Friday is knowing your strategy, like whether you're going to do a discount or not both absolutely [00:09:00] fine. But knowing what you're going to be doing for that. Because as soon as black Friday's over the Christmas sales really start to kick in. Now before black Friday, there definitely is some Christmas messaging around on e-comm, especially people, you know, aiming at those people who like to get their shopping done early. But I would say the bulk of your customers are probably going to be buying after black Friday. I think there's a lot of mentality now about not getting too much before black Friday, because you don't know if there's going to be a discount or not. And. But something. I went to quite a lot last year. So if you're not going to do a discount on black Friday, make sure you tell your customers. So they're not holding off and waiting for black Friday when they really don't need to. Either way. We'll talk about that and much closer to the time, but you need to be thinking about a black Friday because it will impact your customer's buying behavior. And then after black Friday, you're fully into Christmas. You've only got two or three weeks then to really make the most of the Christmas sales. Especially if you want to give yourself a bit of time before Christmas and close orders. A little bit before Christmas. So the, the right people, the right message and the right time [00:10:00] becomes incredibly important. Throughout these few months, because you need to be making sure that you're always thinking about what's on your customer's mind and how you can tap into that. How you can make sure you are still relevant, no matter what is going on. Obviously you need to think about stock levels. You need to be thinking about ordering your stock and the timings and, and all that sort of stuff. But really from a marketing perspective, you need to be thinking about September is all about. Warming up your audience. And historically for my clients anyway, the better their September, the better their Christmas. So if they have a really, really strong September, they warm up their customer base really nicely. They get some good, strong sales. They get real indicator about what people are buying and what they're going to want to see for Christmas. It then translates through to some really strong ads, audiences. Good engagement on social media. Good open rates on the email. And we really can then build on that through to Christmas. So the other side of that, and I talk about lead gen, I probably should quantify that and saying it's actually [00:11:00] service providers. The reason I call it lead gen is because I'm in a Facebook ads weld. You're either going for purchases or you're going for leads if you're a service provider. So probably should have quantified that the beginning of the episode. But, yes. So if I'm talking about lead gen it's, I'm talking about service providers so that anyone that is not selling a physical product, but you're selling a service. Either online or face-to-face. And for you, Christmas might be varied. Quite a lot of my clients who are service-based will shut their businesses over December, or definitely dial down what they offer. They often find that in December people just aren't focusing on services quite so much. And they're actually really focusing on like buying a products for Christmas. And then actually January is really strong once people finish Christmas and new year and they kind of really kicks off the service industry again. But what it does mean is that you can have a real impact on your income right? At the time of year, when you don't want an impact on your income. So it makes September, October and November, even [00:12:00] more important. To make sure you get really strong sales for those. So really focusing on again. What are people thinking about in September? If you do any kind of program or three months, You really need to get that up and running and sold. Within the first few weeks of September, because to get in a three-month program before everyone stops for December is actually quite hard. You need to be starting early to mid September to get three months programming. And even if you don't run the time-bound programs, that it's really important, just to make sure that you are talking to people about what they're thinking about at that time, it might be whether their baby's due this year. It might be what's happening with their child. So it's just really start to think about what your people, what your clients and customers are going to be thinking about in the run-up to Christmas. Sit down, map it all out on a calendar. And start to think about what key messages you might be wanting to talk to them about at different times. So those are the three things you need to know about September [00:13:00] now. And obviously bookmark this one, it come back to it in August. I'll make sure I mentioned it on my social media and on my email list and get you guys to come back to it in August as well. Because it's will be an important one to kind of revisit just before September. But I do also think it's important stuff thinking about this now, say that when you come back in September, it's not a surprise and you can actually get off on a really strong start. And make sure you get those sales in because whether you're e-com or service-based September, October, November are really really key time to get in front of the right people with the right message at the right time. I hope this has been helpful as always, I've been so blown away by all your messages, telling me how much did he love the episodes? That you'll find them really practical. And I really, really appreciate you sending me these messages. Now I am going to be running a free workshop over the next few weeks. I'm going to be launching it in the next few days. So if you're not on my email, wait list already. Make sure you get yourself on it. There is a link in the show notes. I will be releasing the time and date and [00:14:00] topic for that very, very soon. I'm really looking forward to it. I cannot wait to have a lot of, of my lovely podcast listeners on a workshop so I can chat to you all. And actually talk about how I can help your business Where I can see your face because podcasting is a little bit weird like that. Anyway, I hope you have a great day and I will speak to you soon. Thank you so much for joining me this week before you go, make sure you subscribe to the podcast so you can receive new episodes, right when they're released. And if you ever enjoyed these podcast episodes, I'd really love to ask you to leave a review in apple podcasts reviews are one of the major ways that apple ranks their podcasts, and it only takes a few seconds, but really does make a massive difference to new people. Finding me. Thank you again for joining me, Sophie, in this episode of growing pains, see you next time.