Does this sound familiar? The year starts off great. Everyone is excited to launch new efforts and share fresh ideas. Content is created and shared. All goes well for five to six months. Then, the summer lull hits. School wraps up. People are on vacation off and on through the next three months. For many business-to-business content creators, the first six months of the year are when the content train runs at high-speed. After that, content marketers struggle to get commitment from subject matter experts to schedule interview meetings or send information at the beginning of the creation process and reviews and approvals take longer at the end of it, bringing the content train to a crawl.

While editorial calendars are made to be flexible, it’s important to avoid a complete stop in your content marketing efforts. It can be damaging to your overall sales and marketing efforts to lose touch with your audience for an extended period of time. Here are four ways to help your content marketing strategy survive throughout the summer slowdown.

1. Plan Ahead—don’t let absences derail your content creation efforts. Make sure you have access to the company calendar so you can understand subject matter expert’s vacation schedules. Plan your editorial calendar to publish content for when people are working, give longer review time, have a plan B for when deadlines pass.

2. Repurpose Content—review the content you’ve already created and find pieces you can use again so that you can bypass scheduling conflicts. Are there evergreen topics you can use to create something new? For example, turn a blog post into a video or infographic. Are there topics you discussed a few months ago that are still getting a lot of buzz and need to be reshared? Are there much older content pieces you can refresh or update with new information?

3. Invite Guest Experts—use the summer as the time to give other internal or external experts and partners an opportunity to contribute their content to your strategy, whether it’s a guest blog post or joint webinar. 

4. Use Scheduling Tools—social media and content marketers take vacations too. Use scheduling tools to make sure your content strategy doesn’t need to take one too. Today it’s easier than ever to post on social media sites or automate email campaigns. Depending on your needs you can select a marketing automation tool or use schedulers native in the app. Make content contributors aware that you will be scheduling in advance and need their assets by a given deadline.

While summer is made for getting off task, you can also work to re-energize your team by holding a summer brainstorming session to generate new content ideas and topics of focus for the fall. That way you can get another three months of solid content production before the holiday season rolls around!

Photo by Matthew DeVries: https://www.pexels.com/photo/moving-train-2555561/