Weather can play a huge part in your social media marketing plan. Are you incorporating the weather as a key component in how you market?
It’s snowing at my house (in the mountains of Southern California) and I just finished reading more MSNBC info about the snow on the east coast which got me thinking about a couple of things:
1. Living at a 4 season resort makes a person very conscious of power of the weather when it comes to marketing.
2. In my opinion, it doesn’t matter where you live, anyone can use the weather for marketing purposes – you just have to get creative.
“Weather marketing” certainly has its pro’s and con’s. Often times more con’s, but social media has made “weather marketing” a lot easier these past few years. As little as 5 years ago we had to rely on the Los Angeles-based media to get the word out about weather and road conditions in our mountains. Nine times out of ten they gave the wrong information. They would state that our particular highway was closed when in reality it was open to our resort area and closed 15 miles up the road. Of course our tourism and our businesses would suffer severely due to these reports.
Now with social media we can do “real time” marketing, explain exactly what the road conditions are, whether it is safe to be out on the roads, and actually attach photos to prove what we are saying. It’s great to be in control of our own “weather marketing.”
As I write this, it’s not a good day to consider coming to our area. The roads are open, but the drive would be nasty. So today I’ll send out tweets and Facebook posts stating:
- We are in the midst of a beautiful holiday storm, looking forward to seeing everyone up here tomorrow to take advantage of the new snow.
- Check out our webcam and watch the snow come down at Lake Arrowhead here .
- Looking for the best place to visit the snow this weekend in Southern California? Lake Arrowhead is the place to be!
These messages will be picked up all over the place and help get the word out for us. Another helpful tool is Tweetdeck as I have a column for anyone that mentions our area. That way I can jump into the conversation and make sure the marketing message we want to get out, gets out.
The same holds true with our summer “weather marketing.” You can escape the heat by coming up to our area, etc., etc.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a small business or a destination ~ partnering the weather and social media into your marketing plan gives you yet another thing to talk about. And the best part of all ~ it’s yet another way to market and get a conversation going very inexpensively!
Looking for more small business/small budget marketing tips?
*One small business marketing tip each day is posted on the Just a Small Town Girl Facebook page – hope you will visit and drop a note on the wall!
*The Small Town Marketing Handbook (free short ebook) discusses how social media allows each of us to be part of our own “small town” regardless of where we live. Form over on the right hand side of the page.