Summer marketing jobs for small businesses
Quick answer: Summer is a quieter trading period for a lot of small businesses, which makes it the ideal time for marketing jobs you can never find headspace for the rest of the year: things like testing your website's forms and buttons, planning your content for the rest of 2026, checking upcoming awareness days, and working backwards from Christmas to build your autumn plan.
Have you noticed how rush hour traffic is quieter at the moment? So is your inbox.
You know what isn't quieter? Children. They are everywhere. Parks, shops, your own kitchen, demanding snacks and entertainment on a loop that never quite ends.
That's Summer. That weird period where your out-of-office is on, you're checking emails at 11pm anyway, and you've typed "sorry for the slow reply, it's a bit mad here!" so many times it's basically autocomplete now.
Here's the thing: most marketing advice is written as if every month is the same month: post consistently, show up daily, never stop, the algorithm never sleeps and apparently neither should you. That’s nonsense. Your business has seasons. Your marketing is allowed to as well.
So instead of forcing out content nobody's around to read, here's what Summer is actually good for.
1. Test the boring bits of your website that everyone forgets about
Let me guess: you built your website (or, more sensibly, paid someone brilliant to build it), admired it for approximately four days, and then never looked at it that closely again.
Meanwhile it has been quietly decomposing in the background — plugins didn’t get updated, forms stopped working, buttons point at pages that no longer exist, and it does all of this without so much as an alert to warn you. Gremlins gonna gremlin.
Your website visitors likely won't tell you either. They'll just try the contact form, get nothing, and leave. There’s always someone else who’ll offer to fix their problem, and their website forms work… Your potential sale will just go to them while you didn’t even know there was an issue.
Time to take a closer look. Try:
Fill in every form on your site — contact, newsletter sign-up, quote request, booking — ideally in incognito mode — and check the email or notification actually lands where it should
Click every "buy" or "book now" button all the way through to the end, including on mobile
Check your phone number and email address are clickable (tap-to-call matters hugely)
Look at your site through the lens of a potential buyer — can they actually find what they’re likely to look for, or are you expecting them to read your mind?
Test your site on your phone, properly, not just a glance while queuing for coffee — most of your traffic is probably mobile
Check page load speed with a free tool like Google PageSpeed Insights
Look for dead links, especially lurking in old blog posts. You can use a Chrome extension like Check My Links or a tool like Dead Link Checker for this.
Sorry, none of this is particularly fun or glamorous. But seeing as it can also be the difference between someone buying from you or giving up on you forever, three clicks in, without you ever knowing it happened - it’s also worth it.
2. Plan your content for the rest of the year
You do NOT need a content calendar with 47 tabs, colour-coded categories and a super clever spreadsheet formula that took longer to build than an actual piece of content ever will. You need just enough of a plan: one that fits on roughly a page and that you'll actually open again, rather than one that becomes a beautiful, unused digital monument to your good intentions.
The best place to start is with what you're already sitting on, because most people are far richer in raw material than they realise:
What questions do you get asked over and over, by email, DM in the queue at the school gates or at networking events? Each one is a blog post that's already half-written in your head.
What's actually happening in your business between now and December: launches, seasonal offers, events? Your content should support that, not exist in an unrelated parallel universe.
What have you already said once that could be said again? Maybe you were a podcast guest or ran a workshop, or maybe it was a good comment thread on LinkedIn. Remember, content made once can usually be remade multiple times without anyone noticing or minding.
Then block it loosely by month rather than by day. It might be helpful to you to give each month a theme, for example September might be back-to-business energy, October more reflective, November starts nudging towards your Christmas offer, December wraps it all up. You're not writing every post right now (unless you want to!). You're deciding what each month is for, so you're never sat there in October, cursor blinking, wondering what on earth you're meant to say today.
3. Check upcoming awareness days (and pick your battles)
Awareness days can be a double-edged sword. They can act as a genuinely useful hook — a reason to talk about something your audience cares about, and often something they're already searching for.
They can also be noisy, and there are so many of them.
So choose intentionally, thinking about the ones that are most likely to cut through for the people you want to reach.
The test isn't whether something is trending. It's whether you’d actually have something real to say about it, or whether you’re just following the crowds.
If it’s the latter, skip it. Trust me, a forced awareness day post is worse than no post at all.
4. Think about Christmas now, and work backwards
Betsy the Barketing Assistant is always ready for Christmas and always ready for the beach.
I know. It's roasting outside, you're in sandals, and the last thing you want is to think about tinsel.
But here's the maths: if you sell anything people buy as gifts, or that needs a run-up — bookings, workshops, seasonal stock, a big December offer or a festive event — by the time everyone else starts talking about Christmas in November, you will already be behind.
Use the summer to work backwards from your Christmas goal:
Decide what you actually want to happen — a sales target, a fully booked December, a specific something selling out
Work out the deadline — the last order date, the final booking slot, the point past which you genuinely cannot fit anyone else in
Count back from there to when people need to hear about it, and when your content, emails or ads need to be ready
Block the prep time in your diary now, while things are quieter, because time will not magically appear in your November diary — it never has before!
Trust me that Future You, elbow-deep in tinsel and last-minute orders in December, will thank Present You enormously.
(By the way, if this feels overwhelming, I can help you in a single marketing power hour.)
5. Everything else that never makes it onto the to-do list
Summer is also brilliant for those millions of small, unsexy jobs that get bumped every single month because something more urgent or exciting always turns up.
None of these are ever an immediate priority, but all of them compound. Pick a handful and make some progress with them.
Refresh your testimonials and case studies — ask a few recent happy buyersfor a quick quote before the memory of working with you fades into "yeah, they were good, I think?"
Update your "about" page if anything about you or your offer has changed since you last touched it (be honest, it's probably been a while)
Do a proper audit of your marketing channels — which ones are working, and which are you just showing up on out of guilt, like a gym membership you're too embarrassed to cancel?
Tidy your email list — remove the bounces, check your welcome sequence still makes sense and doesn't reference an offer from 2023, consider a re-engagement campaign to wake up your dormant subscribers
Update your best old blog posts with current information instead of always starting from a blank page
Check your Google Business Profile — opening hours especially, if they've changed over summer and you've forgotten to tell the internet
Reread your bio everywhere it appears — website, LinkedIn, directories — and check it's still you, not who you were three years ago
Audit your photos — is there anything on your site that's clearly five haircuts and one rebrand out of date?
Go through your saved/drafts folder on socials and either finish the good ones or delete the ones you were clearly never going to post
Check your analytics — don’t go down rabbit holes, just pay enough attention to notice what's actually working so you can do more of that and less of the stuff that isn't
Unsubscribe from the newsletters that no longer serve you — fewer voices in your inbox, more headspace for your own thinking (and if you’re not subscribed to my marketing newsletter, I’m told it’s well worth doing)
Write down your prices somewhere you can find them — you'd be amazed how many small business owners keep this in their head and their head alone
Check your FAQ page actually answers what people ask you, not what you assumed they'd ask before you started your business
Look at your competitors' websites with fresh eyes, not to copy them, but to notice what you're doing differently (and better)
Batch a few weeks of simple content while you have a bit of quiet, so September-you isn't starting completely from scratch
Sort your digital filing — the folder called "misc" that has 400 files in it knows what it did
Check your links from social bios and email signatures still go where they're supposed to
Ask a friend or fellow business owner to try your website cold, with no guidance, and watch where they get stuck
Revisit your "who I'm not for" — has your ideal buyer shifted since you last thought about it properly?
Book in your own admin — the tax return prep, the insurance renewal, the boring stuff that always gets marketing-shaped panic attached to it when you finally remember
You don't need to do all of this right now
Look, one of the most productive things you can do over the summer is actually chill. Rest, reflect, plot. But if you do have pockets of time, and you feel inspired to use this season to get ahead, why not start by picking two or three from the main list, and maybe five from the extras if you're feeling smug. Block the time in your diary to actually do it - don’t just make a to-do list that can be ignored. And remember: imperfect action on the right thing beats a perfectly colour-coded plan you never open again.
FAQs
What marketing should small businesses do in the summer? Summer is well suited to marketing tasks that need quiet focus rather than an active audience — testing your website, planning content for the rest of the year, reviewing upcoming awareness days, and starting Christmas planning by working backwards from key dates.
Why is Summer a good time for marketing planning rather than posting? Many small business audiences are on holiday or less engaged in August, particularly in the UK where schools break up for six weeks. Rather than posting into a quieter audience, it's a more productive use of time to tackle behind-the-scenes marketing tasks that support the rest of the year.
When should a small business start planning for Christmas marketing? For most small businesses selling gifts, seasonal products or services and events that need to be booked, Christmas planning should start months in advance — working backwards from key order or booking deadlines to work out when promotion needs to begin.
What should I check on my website during a quiet month? Test every form, button and link on your website, check it works properly on mobile, confirm contact details are clickable, and check page load speed. These are easy to overlook day-to-day but directly affect whether visitors convert into customers.