Welcome to the dog days of summer. It is hot and humid where I live and that means one thing: there is a daily chance of thunderstorms. I am not talking about a little rain shower here and there. I am talking about massive, ominous looking clouds that rumble their presence across the landscape. I am talking about the kind of storms that throw down water in sheets, produce gusts of wind that topple the largest of trees, knock out your electricity, batter anything standing with hail and light up the sky with massive strikes of lightning.

Do you know what produces thunderstorms? When there is hot, moist air near the earth’s surface and a high-level cold front approaches, the hot air goes vertical, because warm air rises above cool air. As it does, it pulls water vapor with it, causing very large clouds. The exchange of warm and cool air causes wind. Then, as the water vapor begins to cool up in the clouds, it hits the dew point – when water goes from vapor to liquid. The liquid begins to gather in larger drops of water and starts falling back to the earth. The higher it is, the colder it gets, even below freezing, which produces the solid form of water – ice. These types of clouds are called cumulonimbus clouds and they can be miles high. You can imagine that a piece of ice (hail) falling from 10 miles or higher can get moving quite fast falling back to earth! The falling precipitation produces wind as it pushes the cooler air down with it. Along with these gusts of wind, the electrically charged cumulonimbus clouds begin to drop lightning. This whole unstable episode can produce tornados, hurricanes, flooding and all kinds of pestilence.

Enough with the lesson in meteorology, what does this have to do with marketing? We are living through some other dog days right now. They are known as the fourth quarter of the business year for many of our clients. At this time of the year, the hot and sweaty work of marketing and sales meet the high-level clouds of year-end goals and there are some thunderstorms that develop along the way. It is time for marketing to work to produce sales so those lofty goals can be met. Otherwise, storms will break forth! If you are in sales, you don’t want to hear about brand awareness from your marketing department. You want to hear about converting prospects into customers. So if the marketing department is wanting you to do a golf outing, you will only agree if you can be paired with a customer that has money to spend and an order that has to be filled and can close before September 30. Do you see the storm clouds forming?

If you can relate to this, let me offer some marketing advice to make your summer a lot less tumultuous. First, I would advise you to take a good look at your marketing efforts. If all your marketing is geared towards brand awareness, you need to shift some of your marketing towards two other areas: first time sales and retaining the customers you have. The bottom line - marketing has to help make a sale somewhere along the line. I find a lot of companies are out of balance in the way they spend marketing dollars and the time they put into these two other crucial areas of marketing.

Secondly, I would encourage you to meet with your marketing and sales team at least once per quarter to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing transitions. What do I mean by this? Transitions are methods used to get a potential customer closer to a sale. For instance, let’s go back to that golf outing. If my company has sponsored a hole, I may also want to give some incentive for the golfers to try my product or service. I might give them a free sample of my product along with a coupon for a discount on their next purchase. The hole sponsorship got my brand in front of them, but I want them to try my product, not just know what my logo looks like. That’s why I will give them a free sample. After they try my product, I want them to make a purchase for the first time. That’s why I gave them a coupon. Do you see the transition here?

If you are in the fourth quarter, right now is a key time to be making these transitions work for you. And don’t just do this during the fourth quarter. If your marketing efforts are not producing this type of transition throughout the year, change your approach. Link one thing to the other. It will help your bottom line and make the last quarter go by with a lot less stormy weather.