In this episode of In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris talk the summer slowdown, the time of year when B2B marketers face ever-increasing out of office autoreplies and campaign performance historically drops. What should you do as a marketer during the known slow periods? Options discussed on the show include:

Training and professional development

Backlog creation for agile marketing sprints

Project development

Experimentation and lab work

Marketing to the people who are still in the office

Listen to the episode to spark ideas for your own marketing!

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Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Christopher Penn

In this episode of In-Ear Insights, it is according to our data the summer slow down every, every once about once a quarter, we refresh a look at the times that people search for the term outlook out of office or at gmail out of office or out of office template, about 70 of these different terms in order to figure out when are people not going to be checking their email, because the only reason you ever set a an outlook out of office is because you’re going on vacation, you don’t, you’re not going to be around. And so by forecasting this, we can figure out, okay, when are people not going to be reading emails and things and so the week of June 23, and then the following week, which in the United States is the July 4 holiday, of course, the periods of time when nobody’s home, will least for the next two quarters will be one of the two periods of time when people just aren’t around. So, Katie, what do we do when there’s nobody home?

Katie Robbert

What do we do? We work. And I mean, that not just in the sense that, you know, trust insights as a startup, and we really don’t have an option, but to keep working. But for a lot of companies, you know, it is this summer, slow down period, it means people are on vacation, but not everybody companies don’t just flat out shut down during the summer, they just moved a little bit slower. And so, you know, it’s similar advice to that of which we would give to someone who was looking at a predictive forecast of here’s when search volume is going to peak. And here’s when search volume is going to be a lot lower. What do you do in those lows, while you prepare for the next peak period? And so, you know, let’s say this summer slowdown is going to last the next couple of months. Okay, great. Well, we have a couple of months to really get our house in order. And that means this is a good time for us to do our own technical audits, it’s a good time for us to double check that our analytics governance plans still hold up, it’s a great time to talk through, you know, especially mid year like the strategy that we set at the beginning of the year, does it still hold water? Or do we need to adjust? What is that adjustment period look like? It