For small business owners, summertime can mean different things.

For some, like restaurant owners, summer means an upswing in business. For others, it’s the slowest time of year. No matter which boat you’re in, you should be dusting off your marketing strategy and tweaking it during the summer season.

We use the word “tweak” for a reason. This isn’t a complete overhaul of your marketing strategy. In fact, your primary goals will stay the same. Instead, you’ll refresh key components of your marketing strategy and maybe add a few new elements.

1. Step Up Your Visuals

When the temperature’s high and attention spans are short, visual content is the way to go. An interesting, well-edited photo is the kind of thing that stops someone from mindlessly scrolling through their feed and instead interests them in your product.

Now, this is easier for some businesses than others. An ice cream shop can snap pictures of their smiling customers enjoying colorful cones. But what if you offer a service like accounting? In this case, selling the story is the trick. Instead of taking photos of spreadsheets and paperwork, shots of happy customers or team building activities will help. Link your image to a quality landing page that details your prices and boom – you’re selling through photos.

2. Amp Up Your Social Media Presence

Since summertime is all about social activities – vacations, restaurants, beaches, barbecues – your customers are spending a lot of time snapping and sharing those experiences. This also means they’re on the lookout for what other people are up to. Sharing photos on Instagram or videos through Snapchat increases your chances of engagement and brand awareness even during your slowest season.

3. Make the most of Mobile

Turn your attention to mobile marketing and if you haven’t put much thought into making your ads and blog posts mobile friendly, it’s time to do so now.

Today, more searches are conducted via mobile and people are engaging with their social networks from a smartphone. This means that optimizing your content for mobile phones is vital for your company’s exposure.

Mobile content is especially important in the summertime because there’s less likelihood that your prospects and customers will be sitting at a computer. Instead, they’ll more likely be out of the office, on the move and using their mobile phones.

4. Put Out Your Best Content

Visual content is perfect during summer because generally speaking people aren’t in the mood to read long, dense blog posts. But let’s say your customers are big readers. Summer is the time of year where they’ll catch up on the backlog of content they wanted to read during the rest of the year, but couldn’t.

If you’re going to release an e-book, make sure it’s an entertaining read and that your writers put extra effort into making it the sort of thing your ideal customer would want to download to their tablet and read on the way to the beach.

5. Make The Most of Your Out of Office Emails

If you’re running on a skeleton staff during the summer, don’t just throw in the towel on your marketing. Find ways to keep the conversation going with customers – even if it seems one-sided.

Create customized out-of-office emails that prompt recipients to sign up for your newsletter, check out a specific piece of content on your blog, or contact someone else if needed.

6. Plan For The Fall

Most of these recommendations are geared toward your marketing strategy. But summertime may call for a few tweaks to your overall small business strategy as well.

A major summer initiative should be figuring out how to retain customers who may be making changes over the mid-year months.

The last thing you want is to be blindsided by a client who ends their contract in order to cut costs. If business is slow in the summer, use your downtime to revisit your unique value proposition and think of ways to position your business as a vital service just in case you need to be ready to convince customers to stay.

The warmer months put everyone in a relaxed, laid back mood. But when it comes to your business’s marketing strategy, those are the last two things you should be. So, if you’re attracting fewer customers and have extra time, use it to update your marketing strategy with some of these tactics to put yourself in a strong position for the fall.