6 Marketing tips – Good timing!

Great marketing and great comedy have at least one thing in common: Great timing!

Of course, the opposite is also true.  A comedian with bad timing isn’t very funny and poorly timed marketing isn’t very effective.

With this in mind, here are SIX timing-related marketing tips, to help you improve your results.

Marketing your events

If you are thinking of hosting any kind of event, Google the date you have in mind and check if anything that’s likely to cause a problem is happening on that day. I spoke with a UK based business owner once, who unknowingly picked (and advertised everywhere) the same date for his company’s open evening, as England’s opening game in the football World Cup Finals.

The end result? He was the only person there.

Planning your marketing

The time to start planning your marketing strategy for 2010 is NOT the first day of January – it’s NOW!

Just as you wouldn’t wait until the day you set off on a round the world trip, to start booking accommodation and flights, the same applies when planning your marketing for the year ahead. Leave yourself enough time to plan ahead properly.

Mail shots & follow-up phone calls

If you are sending out a mail shot, which you intend to follow-up with a phone call, send the mailing so that it arrives on a Tuesday.  This way, you can make your follow up calls on Wednesday and Thursday.  If your letter arrives on a Friday there will be a weekend between your prospective customers reading your letter and you making those first follow-up calls.

That’s a long time for your prospective client to remember your letter. Equally, you don’t want to be making follow-up calls on Monday mornings; when your prospects are often at their busiest.

Industry specific timing

There are times of the year where it’s pointless marketing to certain industries and professions.  In the UK, for example, the accountancy profession is extremely busy in January.  As a result, you are far less likely to be able to meet with or even speak on the phone with accountants in January, than you would be in February, March etc.  Of course, US based accountants are busiest on the lead-up to the 15th April rush.

Companies selling training courses and seminars usually find it harder to fill venues during the summer holiday months, than the rest of the year.  That’s because organisations are much less likely to send employees away for a day, when they are already short of people because of holiday cover.

The key thing here is that whatever industries or professions you target with your marketing, make sure you are aware of their busiest months and focus your efforts accordingly.

Email marketing

Whenever possible, I strongly recommend you avoid sending out your email-based marketing on a Friday afternoon.  If your email isn’t picked up that afternoon, it will be stuck in the bottom of their inbox, under a whole weekend’s worth of junk mail, when they check their email again on Monday morning.  This makes it unnecessarily hard for YOUR email message to get noticed.

You have an entire working week to send out your email marketing, so even if it ‘just’ helps your response rate by 10%, it’s got to be worth avoiding Friday afternoons.

Investing your marketing time correctly

My final time-related marketing tip is simple: Don’t waste major chunks of your marketing time, on minor things.  There are only so many hours in a day and only so many of those, which you can invest in your marketing.

For example, I see people waste weeks researching what type of email software to use – and then use it to send hastily written marketing emails.  That’s all wrong.  I see people wait months before they start blogging, doing hundreds of hours of ‘research’, and they still end up repeating the exact same mistakes that most new bloggers make.

Don’t let this happen to you.  Use your marketing time as effectively as you can.

Okay – now it’s your turn

What do you think?  What time-related marketing tips do you have? Share your feedback!