Holidays: the summer marketing checklist for your firm

Most law firms, accounting firms and consultancies treat the summer as a parenthesis. Activity slows, teams go away in rotation, and marketing switches to standby. That collective posture is precisely what creates an opportunity for the firms that choose the opposite.

While your competitors stop their LinkedIn posts, stop feeding their blog and let their CRM sleep, you can produce three months of content for September, finish an SEO audit that has been waiting since January, rework your client segmentation, and optimise the pages of your site that have been holding conversions back for too long. In September, when everyone starts again at once, you have nothing left to launch in a hurry: it is all ready.

This summer marketing checklist is built for the firms that want to turn a traditionally quiet period into an accelerator. Every action is prioritised, operational and adapted to the constraints of a reduced team.

Why is summer an under-used marketing opportunity for firms?

Does the summer slowdown genuinely create a window to get ahead?

Yes, and more significantly than you would imagine. Two phenomena work at once in favour of the firms that keep marketing going through the summer. First, the drop in content published by competitors reduces editorial competition; an in-depth article published in July on a competitive search query statistically stands a better chance of ranking well before September than the same article published in October, when every firm resumes publishing. Second, the greater availability of teams during that period, fewer urgent cases, fewer client meetings, creates space for deep work that disappears the moment September arrives.

Summer is also the period when the autumn investment decisions get prepared. An SME director who goes on holiday with a legal or tax question in mind, a restructuring to anticipate, a succession to organise, a delicate hire to prepare, looks for information during those moments of partial disconnection. If your firm's content answers their questions in July, you are at the top of their list of calls to make in September.

What should you audit and check before the break?

Which actions should you carry out before closing the office?

The two weeks before the break starts are the ideal window for a quick audit of the state of your digital assets. The aim is not to start heavy projects on the eve of the holidays, but to photograph the existing situation and identify the priorities to handle over the summer or in September.

The website audit is the first action. Run a quick crawl with Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) to identify 404 errors, chained redirects and orphan pages. Check your PageSpeed Insights scores on mobile; if your site takes more than 3 seconds to load on a smartphone, you lose between 40% and 60% of your mobile visitors before they have read your first line. Open Google Search Console to see whether indexing errors are being flagged. These checks take two hours and can reveal technical problems that have been holding your search performance back for months.

Checking the marketing tools is the second priority. Check that your contact forms work and that the notifications reach the right people during the break. Test your CRM's automation workflows: if a prospect fills in your form in August, who gets the alert? How quickly? These questions look obvious, but they are rarely checked, and leads can be lost silently for weeks.

Updating the urgent content is the third action before leaving. Check that your contact page shows the summer cover arrangements, that the partners' biographies are up to date after any departures or arrivals, and that the service pages match what the firm actually offers today.

What should you do over the summer to prepare a strong September?

How do you improve your SEO over the summer period?

Summer is the ideal season for the SEO work that needs thinking and production time but whose effects are not necessarily immediate. Search works on cycles of two to four months; optimisations carried out in July will produce their first effects in September and October, precisely when the autumn decisions get taken.

Keyword research is the most profitable SEO project to run over the summer. It means identifying the queries your prospects type into Google when they are looking for exactly what you do, and checking that your site answers those queries with targeted pages and content. A tool such as Semrush, Ahrefs or simply Google's autocomplete lets you build a map of the priority queries in your specialisms and your area.

Optimising internal linking is a technical project often neglected but with a strong effect on search. It means making sure the important pages of your site (service pages, expertise pages, local pages) are properly linked to each other with relevant contextual links. A blog article on redundancy law that carries no link to your "Employment law, supporting directors" page misses an opportunity to pass authority between your own content.

How do you build a stock of content for September?

Producing content is the marketing action with the best long-term return, and the one that needs the most availability to be done well. Summer offers exactly that availability.

An editorial calendar for September is built in three steps. First, identifying the subjects: which questions have your clients asked you most often since January? Which legislative or regulatory changes expected for the autumn will affect your clients? Which search queries do you have no content for yet? Those questions quickly generate ten to twenty subjects for articles or posts.

Then production: a 1,200-word blog article takes on average two to three hours to write for someone who knows the subject. Generative AI (Claude, ChatGPT) can halve that time by producing first drafts the professional adjusts and validates. By giving it two hours a week over six weeks, a firm can build a stock of ten to twelve articles ready to publish, that is three months of editorial presence secured for September.

Finally, scheduling: tools such as Buffer, Hootsuite or LinkedIn's own scheduling let you programme posts in advance. The same logic applies to newsletters through Brevo or Mailchimp. That means that by investing two weeks of production over the summer, you no longer have to find time for communications during the first three months of the new season.

How do you clean up and improve your CRM during the break?

The client database is one of the most valuable and least maintained assets in firms. Summer is the ideal moment for this groundwork, which directly improves commercial effectiveness without tying up the teams during busy periods.

Several CRM projects are particularly useful in this period. Deduplicating and updating the contacts: removing duplicates, correcting bounced email addresses, updating the roles and details of B2B contacts. Segmenting the base: creating lists by client profile (private individual, director, finance director, sector), by status (active client, dormant client, qualified prospect) and by growth potential. Qualifying the prospects: identifying the contacts who have engaged with your content over the last six months without ever getting in touch, and preparing automated nurturing sequences to approach them intelligently in September.

Which checklist should you follow for an effective marketing summer?

A recap of the priority actions by timing

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Should you keep publishing content over the summer?

The question comes up often; the answer is nuanced but leans one way.

Traffic on professional sites does drop in July and August, and engagement on LinkedIn slows. But "less traffic" does not mean "no result". Two arguments support keeping a minimum of publishing going over the summer.

The first is algorithmic: Google and LinkedIn favour sites and profiles that publish regularly. A total two-month interruption can penalise your search ranking and the organic reach of your posts, and it generally takes as long again to recover them. Keeping a reduced rhythm (one article a month, two LinkedIn posts a week) is enough to avoid that drop-off.

The second is contextual: some prospects are more available in summer to read in-depth content. An SME director who receives a useful legal newsletter during their holiday, in a moment of strategic reflection about their business, is more likely to read it attentively than in full swing. It is not the moment for urgent decisions; it is the moment when the intentions form that become calls in September.

Which mistakes do firms make most often over the summer?

Stopping communications altogether is the most widespread mistake. Cutting every channel, blog, newsletter, LinkedIn, Google Ads, for eight weeks means accepting that you will lose ground to the competitors who do not stop, and start again in September with a degraded visibility that will take weeks to rebuild.

Not preparing for September is the second mistake. Coming back from holiday with no stock of content, no marketing plan for the second half and no campaigns ready to launch means spending the first two weeks of September chasing lost time, while the competition has everything prepared.

Neglecting the CRM is the third mistake. Qualified prospects who filled in a form in July and received no answer for three weeks are lost opportunities. A minimum of CRM cover, checking new enquiries twice a week over the summer, avoids that waste.

Not updating the site is the last frequent mistake. Service pages describing offers that have moved on, biographies mentioning partners who have left the firm, news dated March: those signals of obsolescence damage the firm's credibility in the eyes of the prospects visiting the site in summer.

How can AI help firms make the most of their marketing summer?

Generative AI became, over 2025 and 2026, an accelerator of content production that transforms how a firm handles marketing during the summer. What took a day's work can now be produced in two hours, provided the process is organised properly.

A few concrete uses that work particularly well over the summer. Generating content ideas: give Claude or ChatGPT your firm's profile (specialism, clients, area) and ask it to generate thirty article or LinkedIn post ideas for the second half of the year, ten minutes of work that replaces a brainstorming session. Producing first drafts: writing a blog article on a legal or accounting subject by giving the model the broad lines, validating the technical content and adjusting the tone. Building editorial calendars: asking the AI to structure the subjects identified into a monthly calendar with defined SEO goals and audience targets.

The rule stays the same as with any professional content generated by AI: the professional validates every piece before publication, checks the accuracy of the technical or legal information, and signs it in their own name. The AI produces, the professional takes responsibility.

How does OURAMA work with firms over the summer period?

The summer period is one of the most productive for the marketing projects OURAMA runs with its clients. Fewer operational constraints, more availability for strategic decisions and deep work: summer is often the moment when firms take the decisions they have been putting off for months.

A typical summer engagement covers a full marketing audit (website, SEO, content, CRM, social media), the production of a marketing plan for the second half with a detailed editorial calendar, updating or rebuilding the service and expertise pages on the site, producing a stock of content (articles, LinkedIn posts, newsletters) scheduled for September, and preparing the Google Ads and LinkedIn campaigns that will be switched on in September.

That work, carried out in July and August, lets our clients start again in September with a concrete competitive advantage: reinforced visibility, content ready to publish and campaigns ready to launch, without having to tie up their teams on those subjects during the first weeks back.

How will marketing for firms evolve by 2030?

The underlying trend is towards automation and personalisation. The firms that will have structured their CRM, their client segmentation and their automation workflows during these quiet periods will be best placed to benefit from how the marketing tools develop. Predictive marketing, which automatically identifies the clients likely to have a need in the coming weeks based on their past behaviour, is starting to become reachable for mid-sized structures.

Hyper-personalised content, made possible by combining a well-segmented CRM with AI tools, will transform newsletters and email campaigns: every subscriber will receive content suited to their sector, their company size and the subjects they care about, rather than one message for the whole base. The firms that will have done that segmentation work, including through the quiet summers, will have a structural lead in that transition.

Conclusion: summer should no longer be a marketing pause, it is a strategic accelerator

The firms that treat summer as a lull accept starting from zero every September. Those that treat it as a strategic window of preparation start ahead, with content ready, campaigns configured, a clean CRM and a second-half marketing plan already settled.

The difference between those two postures is not a matter of extra resources, it is a matter of organisation. Two hours a week over six summer weeks are enough to produce content that will work for the firm through the following three months.

Three actions to launch this week before the break: block out half a day to audit your site in Google Search Console, write the subjects of your first five September articles, and check that your contact form works and that one person is clearly identified to handle inbound enquiries over the summer.

We work with law firms, accounting firms and consultancies on preparing their summer marketing strategies, from the initial audit through to producing content and configuring the September campaigns. If you want your firm to start September a length ahead, get in touch.

SEO FAQ: the questions people ask most about summer marketing for firms

Is it genuinely worth investing time in marketing during the break?

Yes, but not necessarily during your own holiday. The idea is not to work through your holiday, but to organise, before you leave, a work programme for the team members who are around, or to delegate the identified projects to an outside supplier. Most summer marketing actions (producing content, SEO audit, cleaning the CRM) can be carried out by a supplier or an apprentice without tying up the partners.

Does publishing content in July and August genuinely generate traffic?

Less than in October, certainly, but content published in summer starts being indexed and ranked by Google before September. An article published on 15 July can find itself on the first page of Google on 1 September, just as search traffic picks up. That time lag is precisely what makes summer production interesting for search.

How do you keep a LinkedIn presence going over the summer with reduced teams?

Scheduling in advance is the answer. LinkedIn lets you schedule posts up to three months ahead. By giving half a day before the break to writing and scheduling six weeks of posts, the firm keeps a regular presence with no daily involvement. The best-performing summer posts are often in-depth pieces (analysis, explainers) that the audience reads more during periods of reflection.

Which indicators should you watch over the summer so you do not miss an important alert?

Three metrics deserve a weekly look at minimum over the summer: the number of inbound enquiries (to make sure no prospect is left without an answer), the site's uptime (an outage undetected for two weeks can have significant search consequences), and the Google Search Console alerts on new indexing errors. Those three checks take ten minutes and can avoid problems that would take weeks to fix in September.

What is the minimum budget for effective summer marketing preparation?

The budget depends largely on the choice between in-house and outside work. If the firm's teams take the projects on, the cost is mainly the time involved. To delegate to an outside supplier, a budget of 2,000 to 5,000 euros covers an SEO audit, the production of eight to twelve articles and the configuration of an editorial calendar for September, roughly the cost of half a day of business law advice. The return over twelve months is generally well above that initial cost.

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