They’re here: the dog days of summer.

It’s hot and sticky, people are moving slower than usual, and every week there’s a new group of coworkers out on vacation.

The decelerated pace of life is great if you want to duck out early on Friday afternoon, but it’s not ideal if you want to launch an ambitious new project. Getting a cross-functional initiative off the ground is challenging when you keep hitting up against email autoresponders.

That doesn’t mean your summer can’t be productive. In fact, now is the ideal time to revisit those projects that always seem to get bumped from your to-do list during busier seasons.

You know the ones. The messy pile of data in your CRM that you keep ignoring. The copy rewrite you’ve been meaning to tackle for ages. That workflow that hasn’t made sense since your teammate left…15 months ago.

Your nagging projects may be hiding anywhere. Reflect on your current workflows, processes, systems, and data to find them. As you audit what’s working and what’s not, keep your larger strategic goals in mind. Is your current way of working serving these objectives? And if not, how can you adjust to create greater alignment between your strategy and tactics?

Taking stock of your current reality will help you craft a proposed list of improvements that you’ll be ready to share, discuss, and enact when everyone’s back in September.

Not sure where to start? Here are some projects we regularly see dropping to the bottom of marketers’ to-do lists during hectic periods. Maybe one of them sounds familiar.

• Audit your email list. Clean up and standardize your data, remove hard bounces, and create (or tidy up) your segmented lists.
• Rethink your drip campaigns. Is your set of welcome emails stale? Does your abandoned cart series often go unread? Review and refresh your drip campaigns to address any issues you see in the data. You might even run some A/B testing to compare how changes impact outcomes.
• Create a social media KPI dashboard. Social media content takes a lot of time to make. Invest in understanding the results of your hard work by setting up a KPI dashboard. Identify the metrics that point to your strategic goals, then pull the data from relevant platforms. Update it monthly going forward so you can spot patterns and changes over time.
• Run Google Lighthouse testing on your website. Your site doesn’t just have to look good; it also has to hit all the right development marks. Google Lighthouse can help you spot issues like slow load times, accessibility concerns, or code that’s blocking proper indexing.
• Check your landing page conversion rates. Are the landing pages you’ve created for prior campaigns generating the results you want? If not, now’s a great time to run some A/B tests and see if you can unearth an approach that increases conversions.
• Revisit your about us page. Make sure the copy is selling your business, not simply relaying your history. In fact, you can review all your website content to ensure it’s accurate, relevant, and customer-focused.
• Analyze your blog posts. Take a look through the past year of articles to see how they performed. Are there certain themes that really resonate with your readers? Did one post go viral? Identifying your highest-performing content can help you brainstorm topics for your Q4 editorial calendar.

You can’t expect to completely transform your marketing department over the sleepy summer months. But you can identify opportunities for incremental improvements, and create a game plan for implementing them in the fall. And if every member of your team undertakes a similar review during the season, you’ll have a list of initiatives to tackle in September. What a great way to ensure you start Q4 off on the right track so you can close out the year stronger than ever!

Looking for a team to help you make the most of the summer slowdown? We’re around.