It’s summer.

Which means it’s a great time to get out on the lake or pedal away the miles on some singletrack, but as a resort marketer it’s also a great time to get things ready for the season.

Now, you’re likely doing many of those things already. But let me suggest things more things to consider asking yourself now before the season starts.

What can I simplify?
A couple weeks ago I talked about a simpler approach to email marketing that I hope comes out of some upcoming trends, but as I’ve pondered on the rest of my own marketing efforts and the thinner resources many of us these days, I’ve realized there’s a lot of other stuff that can be simplified.

• Maybe that’s creating a design template for certain assets that can be reused over and over.
• Maybe that’s cutting out a bunch of pages on your site that make your navigation bloated and more important things harder to find.
• Maybe that’s handing off to an agency some marketing channel that you know could be powerful but just don’t have the skills to do efficiently.
• Maybe that’s a blog post that will save your call center a few calls a day this fall.

Wherever that question takes your brain, now’s a great time to ask it.

What content can I already put on the calendar?
While some things aren’t as easy to foresee (storms, rain, etc.), other things are. I heard of a resort recently that has their entire content and outreach schedule planned for the entire season before the season even starts. I think this is a brilliant idea and one that some resorts may not be able to follow 100%, but the effort alone would absolutely be worth the time.

What content can I reuse?
To that end, one of the benefits of doing this would be giving you time to dig through your current media library and figure out what content you can reuse as is, what could be repurposed, and what you’ll need to create or supplement with content that can (and should) only be created in the moment.

What do I want to learn (and measure)?
I may be alone in this, but when I’m busy and I’ve got deadlines to hit, measuring my efforts and trying to learn lessons is one of the first things my mind drops to help me focus on just getting across the finish line. But I’ve also found that if I can take a little more time before I get started to just get those ducks in a row in terms of tracking and conversion and tags and whatever else I need to have in place so, even if I can’t stop in the moment, I’ll have something valuable to learn from when I’m done? Man, that can make a huge difference.

Stop. Think.

The pattern here, of course, is taking a moment to stop and think while you have a moment to do so.

It’s tough as marketers to slow down a little and carve out time to zoom out to think about the big picture to ensure all the dots are connected or zoom into the minutia that can bog us down in the moment.

But if we can make some space for clear, unhurried thought? Man, it almost always pays off.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.