How Marketing Agencies Can Beat the Mid-Year Slump

We recently attended the Cactus Summer Bootcamp for marketing agencies, which was aimed at helping agencies overcome the infamous mid-year slump that is often aligned with the summer holiday period.

Leads slow down, strategies get thrown out, and burnout starts to singe the hard work you’ve put in so far. But this seasonal lull isn’t a reason to pull back, it’s a golden opportunity to double down, refocus, and get ahead of the competition.

The summertime dilemma

The summer slowdown isn’t just about quieter inboxes. Agencies often lose momentum and act impulsively to chase quick wins, drifting from their core strategy in reaction to short-term challenges. It’s common to suffer from inconsistent lead generation, which compounds weekly, and soon it starts to feel like your content strategy isn’t working, the messaging is wrong, and the channels aren’t right.

But switching to a knee-jerk strategy that involves making more noise doesn’t mean you’ll be any more relevant to your target market. If you haven’t already, now is the perfect time to find a sector niche with a specific problem.

Don’t lead with your services

There’s so much competition online for generic services like web, SEO, PPC, social media, branding, etc.; therefore, marketing with a service-led approach makes it so difficult to be relevant.

Instead of leading with what you do, speak about the impact you can have on someone’s business.

Example:

Service-led: We offer paid media management and SEO services to help businesses grow online.

Impact-led: We helped a SaaS brand triple their inbound leads in 90 days, without increasing ad spend, by refocusing their media budget around high-intent search and retargeting.

Notice the difference? Give it a try on your landing pages and social media.

May the strategy be with you, always

You have a strategy because it guides all the activity you do and helps you achieve the business’s wider goals, often related to growth. You should always ask – how is this activity aligned with our marketing strategy (or contributing towards achieving our goals)? But what happens instead is that agencies jump from trend to trend, they copy what others are doing, and they try to maintain a broad appeal.

This is often when strategy is neglected in favour of less meaningful metrics such as likes on social media posts or video views. Rather than pursuing trends, look for trends that are aligned with your goals, or better yet, start a trend.

Your content should almost always have a purpose and a story behind it, and if you can be consistent with that delivery, you don’t need it to be perfectly executed or refined.

What this means for you

Clients are in-market less often, and buying cycles are getting long. That means your touchpoints need to be:

• Frequent
• Targeted
• Value-led

Tactics that work:

• Cold outreach (YES, it still works)
• Attending or hosting events/webinars
• Email nurturing with sector-specific content
• Encouraging client recommendations and referrals
• More client-facing photos and stories on social

Rethink or retire:

• Untargeted networking events
• Gated generic whitepapers
• Automated, “SEO-first” blogs with no real value
• Spray-and-pray newsletters
• Social clutter (clean it up)
  

By making some adjustments to your marketing strategy, you can turn the annual summer slump into a summer glow up for your agency.

That’s a lot to digest for now, but we have a lot more to share. So make sure you check out our next blog when you’re ready to dive back in!