So, you didn’t market your business this summer. You took these past few months off marketing—and if we’re being really honest, this isn’t the first time that’s happened. You’ve gone into summer with big expectations before, only to have it not turn out the way you planned. You’re not alone—it’s happened to me too. That’s how I know.
Today, I’m joined by my first-ever returning guest, Tayler from Enji. You might remember her from episode 27, where we talked about how to stop “accidental marketing” and create a real marketing strategy. That episode quickly became a listener favorite, so if you haven’t heard it yet, definitely add it to your playlist.
Tayler is a small business marketing consultant turned startup founder of Enji—an all-in-one marketing platform designed for small business owners who need to handle their own marketing. Like so many of you, Taylor gets it. She’s not here to give a hard sell, but seriously—if you’re not using Enji, what are you doing? With it, you can build a marketing strategy in minutes, access campaign templates for quick cash infusions or specific business goals, and even join monthly coaching calls with experts. I was one of those experts a few months back, and I can tell you firsthand—it’s 10 out of 10, all around.
Today, we’re diving into a topic I know so many of you can relate to: it’s the end of summer, and you didn’t market your business this summer. Q4 is right around the corner—the biggest quarter of the year for many of us—and you didn’t market your business. Now what? So now you’re wondering, “What do I do? Do I just start throwing a bunch of content out there?”
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If you’re listening in real time, the Black Friday Summit is happening right now—and I’m participating! It’s hosted by Dolly, Mara, and Becca, and it is absolutely a 10 out of 10. I was part of Dolly’s summit about six months ago, and it was incredible. She vets every speaker, watches all the presentations, and, along with her team, delivers an event packed with brilliant marketing minds.
If you’re listening before August 28th, you can still join—the summit runs August 26–28—so go grab your spot here!
So… you didn’t market your business this summer.
This episode might feel a little like a gentle scolding—or maybe a disappointed parent talk—because we all know we shouldn’t take our feet off the gas as much as we tend to, year after year. My hope is that, by the end of this conversation, you’ll remember how you’re feeling right now—the frustration, the regret of realizing you’ve put off something important for your business for far too long—and use that feeling to commit to breaking the cycle next year.
That’s the ultimate goal here: helping you avoid ending up in this same spot, scrambling to get your marketing machine going again. Everything I’m saying is meant with care (soft kid gloves most of the time, maybe off depending on how spicy I get…) but it’s all in service of making sure you don’t have to do this dance again next year.
I want to take a moment to talk about the overthinking that happens when you’re in this situation. For some people, the knee-jerk reaction is, “I didn’t post or do any marketing all summer, so now I’ll open the floodgates and do everything at once.”
But for others, it’s the opposite—you feel stuck, like your feet are in cement. You start thinking, “Everyone noticed I disappeared all summer. Now, if I send a newsletter or publish a post, they’ll be thinking, ‘Oh look, she’s back.’”
Here’s the reality: no one noticed. Which, side note, might be why your leads and sales dipped—but the important thing is to simply start again. It’s not more complicated than that.
And for those tempted to make up for lost time and post 85 posts in 24 hours—don’t. You don’t want to blast all your marketing energy in two days. That’s not the point. The goal is to get the ball rolling again, not to drop a marketing bomb on your audience. Pace yourself so you can keep momentum going, rather than burning out in a single burst.
What should you do if you didn’t market your business this summer?
When you’re getting started again, remember—no one’s been watching you as closely as you think. All eyes are not on you. That said, your brand, business, and offers have probably faded into the background a bit, so you need to ease people back in.
A simple place to start is with content that reintroduces how you can help. Resist the urge to lead with something like, “Didn’t post all summer!”—delete that from your drafts immediately. Instead, reintroduce:
- What you do
- The problem your audience has and how you solve it
- Social proof that shows your product or service works
- Your expertise and background—all the reasons people can trust you, built from years of time, effort, and investment
What you don’t want to do is jump straight into what I like to call “buy my stuff” marketing—going right for the sale. That’s not the right way to ramp back up after a long marketing break.
How can we prevent this inevitable “didn’t market your business this summer” that happens every year?
One thing I know to be true about small business owners who handle their own marketing is this: one of the fastest ways to slow yourself down—or stop entirely—is feeling like you’ve already said everything there is to say. You think, “Well, what else can I possibly say?”
Here’s the answer: spread it out. Milk your messages. Don’t dump everything into one day or one post. If you have multiple points to make—like reintroducing your services, your expertise, and your social proof—give each one its own piece of content.
The same goes for email marketing: don’t cram it all into one newsletter. Let it drip out over time. Because the truth (and yes, you’ve heard this from marketing people a hundred million times) is that if you say everything at once, you’re probably shouting into the void. Hardly anyone will see it, and that’s frustrating.
By breaking your message into smaller, consistent pieces, four separate emails instead of one giant one, you give people more chances to see and engage. If one email only gets a 27% open rate, spreading the message over several sends increases the odds that your audience will actually notice and respond.
This is super underrated. I’m not someone who’s ever at a loss for words, so I often have to edit myself down—but that’s actually helpful here. When you’re warming people back up after letting your marketing slide, remember: your audience has gone cold. You need to reengage them.
If you hit them with a long-winded piece of content, they probably won’t read it. They’ve lost that emotional connection with you. Instead, pare things down to the core message. Make it easy to read and easy to consume. That’s smarter than burying the lead and hoping they’ll stick around for the payoff—because they won’t.
How do you think the Black Friday push plays into this whole “didn’t market your business this summer” pressure?
I was literally talking to a small business owner this morning who’s launching an entirely new business in January, and I told her: “Think of it as already being mid-September right now.”
When it comes to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the winter holiday sales season, it doesn’t matter if you’re B2C selling directly to consumers or B2B selling to other businesses. Either way, you need to start warming people back up now.
Right now, you may have dug yourself into a bit of a hole. This is the time of year when people are most primed to buy, and you want them to already be on the edge—interested, researching, and just waiting for a little nudge to push them over. If you wait until Black Friday to start, they’ll be nowhere near that edge.
Here’s why: those who kept marketing over the summer have what I’ll call a “flying start.” Imagine a 100-meter dash—you’re standing still at the starting line when the gun goes off, while the person next to you has already been jogging toward full speed. They’re going to fly past you because their audience is already warm.
That’s the lesson to keep in mind: always set yourself up for success so you’re never starting from a dead stop. Ask yourself:
- What do people need to hear from me to know, like, and trust my business again?
- What do they need to see, hear, and feel so they’re on the edge—ready for a simple flick from me to click “add to cart” or send an inquiry?
Starting from momentum is infinitely easier than trying to build it from scratch. But you can do this even if you didn’t market your business this summer.
What should people focus on right now if they didn’t market your business this summer?
Here’s something important to remember: the marketing you do today won’t bear fruit immediately. That’s why I always say—tattoo this across your forehead—marketing is farming. And if you didn’t water your crops all summer, they’re dead. Now it’s time to tend to them again.
So, think about this: what will you be promoting during Black Friday, the holidays, and the winter buying season? That’s where your focus should be right now—on re-sparking interest in those specific products and services. You want people thinking, “I don’t need this today, but I bet [your business] will put this on sale during Black Friday. I’m going to keep an eye on them.”
One smart way to start: write a blog, or a couple, about those products or services. Then repurpose that long-form content across your other marketing channels. Take the words you’ve already crafted and use them to make the rest of your marketing easier.
How can we use blogging as a way to kickstart marketing (after you didn’t market your business this summer)?
Start with a blog post highlighting the product or service you want to promote. I’d strongly encourage you, dear listener, to weave in social proof—people are always more comfortable buying something they know others have had success with. Even a short testimonial or review works wonders. If you can go further and share a full case study, especially for higher-ticket items, that’s even better.
For email newsletters, I recommend breaking your promotion into multiple sends, like Kara mentioned. Back when I ran my consulting business, my workflow was simple: I’d take the introduction from the blog post, the part that opens with a story and hooks the reader, drop it into an email with a hero image at the top, and add a “Read More” button linking to the blog. That’s it. No new content required, and it was always the first way I’d alert people to a new post.
I’m also a huge fan of content roundup emails. They’re quick to put together—just short blocks of content with an image, headline, and button. In these, I’d include the blog post alongside the product or service it featured, and then layer in a piece of social proof right below. Again, you’re not creating anything new—you’re simply putting the same high-value content in front of your audience multiple times, in multiple ways, to re-familiarize them with it.
My analytics have consistently shown that these types of email newsletters get the most clicks—because I haven’t buried the lead. They’re quick to read, easy to digest, and those big, flashy “click me” buttons are front and center.
If your goal is to warm people back up, make it effortless for them to get back onto your website. That’s always good marketing practice, but it’s especially important if you haven’t been driving traffic there all summer. Content roundups are a great way to incentivize or retrain your audience to click through and re-engage with you again.
As you were talking, this popped into my head: people also need to remember you don’t have to write brand-new blog posts right now to get started again.
Yes—all the yeses—use what you already have. Unless you’re a true outlier with nothing relevant in your archives (and I doubt that’s the case), you can pull together a small collection of helpful blog posts about that product or service. If you’ve been on a podcast talking about it, include that too.
Kara and I are not saying, “You didn’t market your business this summer, so now go create a pile of brand-new, long-form content.” That’s not realistic, and honestly, you’d probably just say, “Nope, not doing that.” Instead, take what already exists and repurpose it. That’s the easiest way to go from a dead stop back into motion—back into running, to borrow my earlier analogy.
How Can Enji Help Someone Who Didn’t Market Your Business This Summer?
One feature I know many small business owners in our community have really embraced is the blog repurposing tool. It’s different from what you described with ChatGPT—which is also great, by the way. Enji and ChatGPT actually complement each other well; there are things ChatGPT can do that we won’t try to, because we’re not trying to be ChatGPT.
With our blog repurposing tool—whether you wrote the blog using Enji’s AI copywriter or the old-fashioned way—you can now ask Enji to either promote or repurpose the content.
- Promote: Creates social media captions for your chosen platforms with the goal of getting people to click through and read the blog.
- Repurpose: Takes the blog’s content—topics, headlines, copy—and turns it into new captions for those platforms, with the content itself leading the post and the CTA at the end encouraging readers to visit the blog for more.
In just a minute or two, you can go from one blog post to 20+ pieces of social content, all tied back to that single post, with just a couple of clicks. We launched this a few months ago, and people are finding it incredibly helpful—because life doesn’t slow down. And honestly, Kara and I are part of the problem; we’re always telling you to repurpose your blogs. So, we built a tool to make that process ridiculously easy.
This workflow is something I’ve followed my entire marketing career. It’s just easier to start with something that already exists. Here’s my on-the-spot construction analogy: it’s shockingly easy to demolish a space—grab a sledgehammer, and in minutes it’s gone—versus building something from the ground up. Repurposing content is like breaking apart a finished structure; you already have the materials, you’re just rearranging them.
Starting from scratch, on the other hand, is overwhelming. It’s where people get stuck overthinking, feel pressured, and often shut down. I don’t want you starting there. Begin with what’s already worked. Re-promote it. Then, look ahead to what you’ll focus on in the fall and winter, and warm people up for that now.
And most importantly—commit to doing the work without biting off more than you can chew. That way, you can adjust your marketing pace based on the season: heavier in winter, lighter in summer, but never completely taking your foot off the gas.
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