INTRODUCTION

If you work in marketing for a live event, experience or a visitor attraction, you already know that summer is not one long peak - and every year inevitably brings unexpected curveballs such as 37 degree heat waves.

It is a messy combination of school holidays, wet Wednesdays, half-empty Tuesdays and sold-out weekends. And your budget - what budget? More with less is always the requirement and your creative brain has melted a little - there are only so many ‘quick fixes’ and ‘mega ideas’ that you can power with Soleros alone.

I've spent the last 15+ years helping attractions, experiences and tourist destinations figure out what actually makes a real difference in the messy middle between what makes them brilliant and what their audience wants to hear. Here are nine low-maintenance things you can do this week that will help your summer sell harder, without spending money you don't have.

1. Be repetitive on purpose

You are so bored of your own messaging that you assume everyone else is too. They aren't. Most people won't see your post the first time, or the second. Take the three things you most want people to know this summer and put them in front of your audience on repeat, in a slightly different format each time. Video, carousel, story, meme, email. Repetition is not lazy, it’s how people finally take notice.

2. Turn your reviews into your marketing team

Your visitors are already writing your ads. Screenshot the best line from a review, put it against a photo of the moment they're describing, and post it. One of the things people always scribble down excitedly when I speak at events is auditing your messaging with the language of your visitors. Compare your last 10 social posts with your last 10 reviews and you’ll see how different the keywords and tone are - bring them closer together.

And using reviews works because it isn't you saying you're good, it’s someone in Northampton who wasn't sure and came anyway and had a great day. That is the social proof that makes a family in Loughborough click book now.

3. Market to the trigger, not the date

Stop posting "school holidays start on Monday". Start posting "if you've heard the words I'm bored three times before 9am". Parents especially aren’t looking for a solution to ‘it’s Wednesday’, you’re trying to connect the moment a parent realises they need to get out of the house. Write your copy at the trigger, not the calendar.

4. Go behind the scenes

The stuff you find boring because you see it every day is the stuff your audience finds fascinating. Checking the curtains will lift at the right moment, creating a cordon for the huge crowds you’re expecting, briefing your front of house. Film a 20-second clip on your phone once a day for a week. You will have more content than you know what to do with, and it will outperform your polished stuff by a clear mile.

5. Go ugly

The video shot on the back of your phone in bad light will beat the video shot with the drone and the graded colour. It looks like a real person made it. Which means people trust it. Which means they engage with it. Which means the algorithm shows it to more people. Save the polished asset for the paid campaign. Post the ugly one for free. ‍ ‍

6. Play with prompts

If you aren't using AI to speed up the boring bits of your job by now, you are working harder than you need to. Invest in Claude (always happy to share my 101 on it changing your life!).

And start with three prompts. One that turns a customer review into three social captions. One that turns your top three FAQ answers into a blog. One that gives you five hooks for a piece of content you already have. Then build from there. I won’t even go into the data and analytical wins - I’ve never been so obsessed with using AI to understand consumer behaviour.

7. Own the search phrase, not the season

Everyone is writing "things to do this summer". You'll get lost in it. Instead, own something narrower. "Rainy day things to do near Blackpool with a three-year-old." "Free things to do in Chester with teenagers who hate everything." The searches that convert are the specific ones, especially when it comes to the events and experiences that LLMs find and recommend. Write for those.

8. Repurpose one insight nine ways

You don't need nine ideas a week. You need one strong insight repurposed nine ways. If you've noticed that families with under fives always ask about buggy access, that one insight is a LinkedIn post, a TikTok, an email subject line, a website FAQ, a paid ad hook, a blog post, a carousel and two Instagram stories. It might feel boring, but when you rope in two members of staff to create some UGC video content with you - one in the buggy, the other pretending to be the parent, then all of a sudden an important logistical consideration also becomes a piece of entertaining content.

One last thing from me

The reason most summer marketing doesn't quite create the hype and hysteria that you were banking on isn't because the ideas are bad but because the ideas were aimed at the wrong moment. They're aimed at the moment someone opens Instagram. What you want is to be there in the moment someone realises they haven’t seen a show for ages, or they’ve been keeping an eye out for something to do with the friend they see once a year in August. That is the messy middle. That is where your audience is deciding. And the closer your marketing gets to sitting inside that moment with them, the harder your summer will sell.

If you'd like a hand joining any of this up for your campaign, I'm always up for a chat.

Written by :

Catherine Warrilow, The Plot

Find Catherine and lots more advice on LinkedIn

www.theplotthickens.co.uk

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