Best Small Business Hacks for Maintaining Productivity Over the Summer Holidays

During July and August around 50% of people take at least 2 weeks annual leave.

This is largely because the 6-week school holiday runs from the third week of July to the end of August.

This means that working parents often end up using their annual leave to provide childcare for those 6 weeks as well as it being the main opportunity to go on a family holiday.

Of course, as employers we want employees to have a healthy work/life balance and we also want to take time off to spend with our own families.

But, especially for small businesses, these six weeks of the summer holidays can impact heavily on productivity, particularly when it comes to bringing in new business.

It stands to reason that when there’s a skeleton staff for 6 weeks of the year, that focus goes on existing customers and orders so things like drawing in new business with marketing and social media and tracking and following up on potential leads fall to the wayside.

If only there was a hack for putting the word out about your business and following up on leads without needing all hands on deck.

At Approved Business we’ve got the news you were hoping for…there is!

Follow these tips to ensure that your business doesn’t miss a beat while you and your employees enjoy some well-deserved r and r with your families.

Social Media

As you probably already know, being active on social media is one of the top ways potential customers will discover and find out more about your business. So when you or your employers are on annual leave you don’t want to lose your momentum on your social media platforms and miss all of that potential new business. There are a couple of ways you can keep your social media pages active when the person responsible for it, whether that’s you or your marketing specialist, is on holiday.

Use a scheduling tool such as Hootsuite or Friends+Me to automate posts.

Outsource – hire a social media manager either on a full-time basis or to just provide holiday cover.

Use AI

Take advantage of the AI tools that can save you bags of time and take on jobs within your business.

• Get a chatbot on your website to manage the more basic customer service tasks such as answering common queries and signposting.
• To redistribute tasks among your team while you or other team members are away consider using a tool like Asana.
• If you write your content and copy yourself or if your in-house writer is away, consider using an AI writing tool such as Chat GTP or Jasper.

Email Marketing

Marketing via email newsletters is an effective way to get yourself in front of your prospective customers but writing a newsletter takes a lot of time and effort. No wonder it’s one of the first things to go out the window when you are taking leave or when your short staffed.
Approved Business can take over this time-consuming yet effective aspect of your marketing strategy – get in touch with us to find out about our email marketing packages.

Tracking Leads

Analysing website data to try and get an idea of who visited and how you can follow up is so time-consuming. Yet, these are warm leads that it pays to track and trace so how to do this all-important job when you’re covering for others or taking some important time off for yourself? The answer is Web Traffic Revealer – there’s no surprise this is the UK’s number one tracking tool. By giving you and your team easy access to the data you need on every visitor to your website to make converting a walk in the park.

Summing Up

To sum(mer) up, make the most of the options available to help you make the summer months less stressful for you as a business owner and allow you and your employees to take the time to make memories with your families without losing new business.