On marketing projects for summer & upcoming Q&A
Bonjour from my garden, which is where I promised to go after leaving LinkedIn for good. Well I kept my promise.
It is summer in London, and this made me think on the question as ancient as pyramids: What are marketers supposed to do during the summer slow season?
First, a couple of updates. Later, some recommendations for summer workdays (read until point 5 β the most important one).
As always, thx for reading and forwarding to others.
Q&A: Submit your questions, ask me anything Ω©(ββΏβｑ)ΫΆ
The Marketing Fix newsletter is going on a summer vacation from July-September.
The season finale on June 27 will be a Q&A special.
This time, you can ask about anything, from marketing strategy to LinkedIn ads, freelance life to book recommendations.
βSubmit your questions here before June 20.
In case you missed it, here's the Q&A issue on freelance life from June 2024.
Zero LinkedIn for 3 weeks (ββ’ ΰΌ β’β)
In my previous newsletter (read it here), I wrote about my decision to leave LinkedIn.
Ironically, my LinkedIn post on the subject became the most viral thing I've ever posted.
Thanks to everyone who commented, and sorry if I didn't respond.
I actually did go off the platform, only checking a few times to see where the discourse was headed.
It has felt great. No despair from seeing the stupid AI prompt clickbait posts, more time to work on my clients' marketing projects, blog, and creative writing.
I'm going to stay off LinkedIn for a while.
P.S. There were also some LinkedIn gurus who commented that I just need to filter my feed better. I suppose they were right. But you know what?
I would much rather read long-form articles and books that I purposefully choose than scroll over random posts chosen for me by algorithms.
By the way...
Come say hi on Instagram. : p
What should marketers do over the summer?
If you read this question and thought "vacation and rest," you're absolutely right. π¦
But if you can't take the next 60 days off your marketing job, how to make the most of it during the breezy season?
Summer is a slow season for most marketers. Your results are going to drop. The sales guys are going to complain.
The B2B deals stay on hold while your B2C audience is preoccupied with having fun offline & praying for a mystic power to fix their post-sales-season budget hole.
Even if summer is a high season for your industry, you've (hopefully) launched the summer campaigns already.
In this penultimate issue of Marketing Fix, I'll share some ideas for spending your summer work hours in a more productive way.
That's what I would be doing, if I weren't going on a 60-day vacation to finish my prose poetry pamphlet and start working on a novel. (ββ’ Φ β’β)
Summer projects for marketers
During my full-time-employee summers as Global Head of Marketing at Bolt, I rarely took a vacation longer than 2 weeks at a time.
The example is somewhat of an outlier, as for Bolt summer is a high season. People go partying & travelling and need rides. Also, we were launching several new markets per week, either for rides or scooters or food delivery.
But what if you're working on a less intense summer-sales environment?
How to make the most out of the slow summer months as a marketer?
1) Conduct a 360Β° marketing audit
In February 2025, I launched the 6-week DYI Marketing Audit course with 15 participants. (I may do another one in September 2025)
Here are the two key learnings, shared by all the participating marketers:
- It takes a lot of time (ca 60h in total) to write a detailed marketing audit that covers all channels.
- It's difficult to write a marketing audit when tens of little daily tasks cloud your focus.
If you have a 4-week quiet period over the summer, use it to audit your marketing strategy, find areas of improvement, and create a plan for the next 6-12 months.
2) Learn to design with Figma
Being able to design ad creatives, landing pages, and social posts on your own gives you incredible freedom as a marketer.
No more waiting behind the Design team, busy with product designs.
Indeed, there are many other design tools, say Canva, that are a little bit easier to use.
But the little bit of extra convenience comes at a high cost: you will be limited to basic designs with few customisation options.
Knowing how to design (in Figma) will also make you a much more attractive hire for future employers.
Personally, I have never used Canva or other marketer-oriented tools. I just learned to use Figma by getting the desktop app and giving it a go.
Let me show one more example to get you excited about Figma β and willing to take on a new design-study project.
This is my literary blog.
When I got the idea of launching a separate blog for sharing my short stories, book reviews, and essays in 2023, I wanted to create a blog that looks quirky and different.
I also wanted to have article pages that use special typography and are optimised for readability like the New York Times article pages.
β
As I browsed for ready-to-use Wordpress theme templates, I couldnβt find anything that resembled my imagined website.
So I designed the entire blog from scratch on Figma and hired a front-end developer to turn my designs into a Wordpress blog.
This is a screenshot of my literary blog designβs Figma file. β
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It took me about one week to create the entire blog, including the typography, colour scheme, and article images.
One week doesnβt sound too bad, right?
Learning to design in Figma isnβt a hard task. All it takes is some curiosity and willpower.
3) Level-up your brand marketing
Over the summer, you can shift the focus of marketing activities on brand perception vs direct sales.
This could mean...
- Working on an industry trend report as a B2B brand
- Filming & posting more high-quality or high-fun Instagram Reels
- Reviewing your automated emails and improving them to deliver more value to your audience (instead of just selling)
Just take 1-2 days and think. How can you deliver more value β either practical or emotional β to your audience(s).
Run workshops. Do brainstorms. Have fun while at it.
4) Prepare for the Q3 high season
If you're waiting for September to restart your marketing campaigns, now's the time to start preparing.
Perhaps, you should review your seasonal marketing budget allocation.
Perhaps, you should book the outdoor media placements for the September-November season.
I'll keep this point short, but you get the idea.
Big-scale marketing campaigns are planned months ahead. Start now.
5) Take a real vacation & return as a better version of yourself
Here's the most important thing that marketers should do over the summer: GET SOME REST.
I've noticed that whenever I have a weekend 100% off-screen, I return to my laptop and work tasks on Monday fully energised, even excited.
By the 3rd summer I worked at Bolt, I had never taken a vacation longer than two weeks.
I felt that if I left for longer, the entire company would fall apart.
Of course, I was wrong.
One day, I had a revelatory thought.
What if something happened to me, say I was run over by a car and broke a hip bone?
Immediately, my concerns would shift to making it out of the hospital and curing my body. Meanwhile, I would be completely off the company Slack and marketing meetings for 30 days or longer.
And you know what? The rest of the team would carry on just fine without me.
That summer, I took 4 weeks off work. I didn't check Slack and work email once (highly important!).
As I returned to the office, fully rested, rejuvenated, and reborn, I saw that my team had become more self-reliant and organised.
Me being away for a month had had a positive effect on my team's collaboration dynamics, proactivity, and output.
This story is to say: Absolutely nothing will break while you're away.
Don't overthink it. Just have a proper vacation. Ignore emails and Slack. And return as a better, non-burnt-out version of yourself.
6) Read, see art & performances, travel (to non-cringe places)
I really liked a video post that Jaskaran from Social Juice shared this week.
He wrote about the importance of cultural capital as a marketer.
"People that do good marketing and creative work, donβt study the viral ads. They learn from creatives behind those campaigns and educate themselves about art and culture."
This is so true.
If you want to be a TOP 5% marketer, you need to be a curious human being.
If you're happy to be the bottom 50%, just keep getting all your ideas and copywriting from ChatGPT.
I will share my summer reading recommendations in the season finale edition of Marketing Fix.
For starters, you can browse the "Needles in a haystack" section of past issues + my list of 10+10 personal-favourite marketing and literary books.
Summer update
I'm going on a long summer break from July 1st, to finish my collection of prose poems and begin writing a novel.
If you'd like to hire me as a marketing advisor in September, feel free to reach out now to secure availability.
I've already said no to a few people who tried to convince me to work over the summer.
Some would call it leaving money on the table.
I call it having a purpose in life that's more than work and money. (κ α΄ κβΏ)
For September projects, see the newly-updated page about how you can bring me onboard.
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Thanks for reading!
Have a good one, and stay (almost) clear of AI.
Karola