You're on vacation, but does this mean that your business is going to relax as well? When you have a business that operates online, you can't turn off the lights and close up shop. How do you keep your business moving along and bringing in clients when you're out of the office?
Prepare Your Employees
If you have flexible employees, you're in luck. You may not be used to delegating social media roles to them, but if you have advance notice of your vacation, you can work to train them in this role. You'll probably want to create content yourself, but if you have a staff who can monitor and even reply to blog post comments or social media messages, you can rest easy knowing that someone's minding the messages for you. Be sure to be clear about the branding and messaging you want to portray to your readers so that the tone of your business remains consistent even when you're away.
Get help from other employees or from virtual assistants when you're away.
Get Virtual Help
If you don't have employees or everyone's too busy to take on marketing while you're away, consider getting a virtual assistant. This assistant can work with your existing social media messages and help answer questions and reply to blog posts. Make sure that you invest in some training time and give your virtual assistant a trial run before you go.
Create Blog Content in Advance
When you're away, your blog can keep right on writing. Plan for the time when you're away as you always would, but write your content in advance. This allows you to address seasonal trends and needs through pre-planned posts. Set your blog posts to come out while you're away.
Anticipate the Response
While you're away, there could be a question or a problem or two. Anticipate that this will happen, and plan accordingly. Whether it's creating a list of the most important features of your new product so that your employees can highlight these or considering how a somewhat controversial post could initiate feedback, anticipating the response to your inbound marketing efforts will help you and your employees plan how your business will respond so that you'll go on vacation with a plan in place.
Take Time to Connect
You already plan to nurture your leads and create new resources for them, so why stop while you're on vacation? If you have a monthly, weekly, or seasonal email or a resource you'd like to promote, send it out while you're away. Be sure that you can direct people to ask questions to your other employees, or send out items that will generate a lot of questions directly before you return, so that you can spend time answering them.
Use Your Out of Office Message as a Marketing Tool
We've all written the typical out of office message, stating the dates you'll be away and who to contact in your absence. If you're sending a message to your clients, every message counts, even your auto-reply. Use this opportunity to highlight a new campaign or materials that you've published, or get more imaginative with creative auto-replies that highlight issues in your field.
One of the biggest challenges of the small business owner is how to take time off. Whether you're unplugging completely or you're going to remain connected but work a lot less, you need to have strategies to keep your business running. When you're looking for digital marketing strategies, Digital Inbound can help. Contact us to learn more about how you can increase your inbound marketing capacity.
