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There are two crucial elements to marketing, planning and implementation. For reasons that seem self-evident, the quality of the implementation will depend in large part on the quality of the planning. Thus, if you do nothing else during the summer months it's an extremely good idea to at least focus on developing marketing plans that you will implement in the fall.

What exactly does this mean? For many small businesses this has been a brutally difficult first six months. The recession has taken its toll on most businesses. Although the economy is showing signs of coming back, it's far too early to be optimistic with any amount of certainty.

That is why the summer is a good time to think about the markets you serve. If you have been aggressive in ramping up your marketing efforts but your niche markets have remained unresponsive, perhaps it is time to focus on some new markets. Knowing when to cut one's losses is as equally important as recognizing when tenacity and persistence are key.

Summer is also a good time to look over your marketing materials. Is your free report a bit stale? Offering free information is still a highly effective method to get prospective clients to self-identify themselves that they are interested in your services but the topic needs to be something about which they have a lot of curiosity and interest.

I realize that this last piece of advice sounds a bit like a blinding grasp of the obvious, but now is a good time to review your materials with a critical eye. One easy way to do this is to simply ask your existing subscribers and readers. Not only is this a great excuse to get back in touch, but also it is also very likely that you'll pick up some good marketing intelligence.

That still leaves the question of whether summer is a good time to implement a marketing campaign. The answer is that it's a bit of a mixed bag. Not surprisingly, campaigns that target new prospective new clients will draw responses lower than campaigns conducted in the spring or fall.

However our experience has been over the past 17 years that the quality of people who respond to marketing initiative are higher than during other times of the year. We find that those that respond during the summer have a passionate commitment for solving their particular business challenges and tend to be more willing to invest in solutions.

The other piece of good news is that clients who are unearthed during the summer tend to also want to implement their solutions quickly. Thus leads that are developed in the summer can provide a positive bump to your fourth quarter results.

However, whether you actually implement a business development campaign during the summer or not, one thing you definitely should be doing is planning your marketing for the remainder of the year. This means focusing on three items.

First take the summer as an opportunity to give some good thought to the most effective methods ways for getting people initially interested in your services. There's no shortage of lead generation methods but from a practical perspective you can only implement a few of them. You want to make sure that you focus on where the greatest likely return will be found.

Secondly the summer is a good time to make sure your website is designed to compel people to give you information about themselves in exchange for your valuable free report. Remember that there are two different types of websites that you may wish to have. The first is you online corporate brochure. The second is likely to be no more than a single page, but it's designed exclusively for marketing purposes. This is where you sell the value of the free reports or videos that you offer.

Finally summer is the best time of year to take a 10,000-foot look at your marketing. The key question I'd ask is "Do y you have a marketing system in place, or is it a collection of unconnected activities?" Remember that marketing produces the results you desire when each component in the process advances the relationship building process to the next step. This is a good time of year to assess if yours does that.