From an email article by Jay Levinson
If your marketing is right, but your timing is wrong, watch out. Even the best-laid plans go awry when the timing is off. Here’s how to prevent that.
Sometimes a company actively markets the right product or service to the right people in the right media. But the marketing turns out to be a flop all because of poor timing. In order to get the most mileage from your marketing, you’ve got to be keenly attuned to the right times and the wrong times. To gain a bit of insight, consider these ten examples:
- You’ve created the perfect mailing package, but it arrives too early in the week, when your prospect is thinking of the week ahead — or too late, when your prospect is thinking of the upcoming weekend. Moral: See to it that your mailing arrives on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.
- You’ve got a fine product but a limited budget and a lot of competition. What to do? Do your marketing when your competitors have eased up and you can gain the largest share of mind with the smallest marketing investment. Maybe that will be during what are deemed the slow months. But it’s when you can attract the most attention the fastest.
- Everybody receives Christmas catalogs in September and October. If you sent yours during July or August, you’d get people thinking of your company then and later on as well. It’s may sound a bit crazy, but if you explain why you are mailing at that time, it will make sense to your prospects. Naturally, this applies to times other than Christmas.
- You keep abreast of current events by watching the tube, reading the paper, accessing online news services, perusing newsweeklies, and subscribing to publications within your industry and community. You should be doing this, and if you do, you can tie in your offerings with what is happening at that moment in history. A recession is ugly except to companies that realize it is an ideal opportunity for them to make sales.
- Be careful not to launch your marketing too soon. One of the most common errors in marketing is to promote before all the bugs have been worked out, before the salespeople know all the facts, and before you are ready to fill the flood of orders and engage in guerrilla follow-up. Remember that patience is a guerrilla virtue.
