Summer is the time to be proactive, not park thought leadership
We’ve all been there. The pace slows. Inboxes quiet. Meetings get postponed. Across the tech and telecoms world, a familiar refrain kicks in for comms teams: “Let’s park that for now.”
But for successful organisations, this mindset is a mistake. When everyone else pauses, that’s your chance to drive thought leadership, making your PR campaign stand out from the competition.
Evidence? LinkedIn reports a 10% rise in engagement rates for ads during the summer months, attributed to reduced competition as many companies scale back their marketing efforts.
Summer is Quiet. That’s the Point.
The oft-held view is that summer isn’t worth the effort. Internal stakeholders are away, thought leadership topics are fairly evergreen, so it can all just kind of wait.
But this outlook misses two important points:
- Your audience may be smaller — but so is the noise.
- Not everything you publish is about instant impact.
News doesn’t stop for a beach holiday, and neither does thought leadership. Publications still need engaging content to maintain and grow their audiences. LinkedIn also doesn’t stop showing content and search engines don’t stop crawling sites because they’ve got a piña colada in hand. That opinion piece you publish during the “quiet period” has a better chance of being seen, simply because it has less to compete with.
Sew Now, Reap Later
Thought leadership isn’t about a one-day spike in traffic. It’s about visibility that compounds.
That blog or byline you publish in July will still be working for you in Q4. It’ll be indexed. Shared. Referenced. And, if it’s good, it will shape perceptions long after the sunburn fades.
So why wait for September, when the market’s flooded with everyone else’s “big push”? Summer is your head start.
When the Client’s on Holiday, the Agency Shouldn’t Be
This is also where trust comes in. Your team might be offline. But that doesn’t mean your comms should be.
A proactive agency doesn’t wait for instructions. It plans ahead. Surfaces relevant hooks. Gets on with writing, pitching, and placing content — without you needing to approve every step in real time.
That’s the difference between an agency that needs hand-holding, and one that adds real proactive value.
At Babel, we pride ourselves on being that kind of agency. Clients trust us to keep momentum going, even when they’re out of office. We understand their positioning, follow the news agenda, and — crucially — know what not to say as much as what’s worth shouting about.
The Summer is a great opportunity to experiment with a PR project that focuses on a thought leadership boost. If you’d like to learn more about how we go about making that happen for our clients, get in touch.
Declan Bradshaw
Senior Campaign Director
