Business Buzz - Making You Famous

In past posts we’ve discussed basic PR/Marketing staples like press releases and social media; today we want to focus on one of the most important things that relates to all marketing and PR tactics‑‑‑‑timing.

Timing is one of the most important aspects to consider when planning your marketing campaign. It not only affects little things like social media posts or when to pitch to the media, but it can affect really big things like when to start your holiday marketing campaign or when to announce your next product launch. Look at what happened as this reporter was talking about the hard to spot Blue Whale.

As important as timing is, we’ve come up with a few tips to help you make the best decisions, timing wise, for your marketing campaign:

1. People are busy, make things quick and easy for them: Make your information easily accessible for people who don’t have a lot of time. If it takes too long to read or look at, most people will just skip it due to their limited time. You want to make yours something they are interested enough to engage in.
2. Use the correct timing for the channel you are using: When creating your campaign plan, make sure that you consider the timing for all of the channels you plan on using. For example, pitching to the media and social media should not have the same timing. Traditional media pitching should often be done weeks in advance of any public social media posting. News on social media has a lifespan counted in hours, while a direct mail campaign can be counted in weeks or even months.
3. Check your analytics: If you’ve tried posting and are not getting the results you want, look at your analytics. Popular platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn offer these tools free of charge. They provide information about when you audience is online, what time your most successful posts have been, and other invaluable data that can help you formulate new strategies. Google also offers a free analytics tool that helps you track times when your website receives the highest traffic patterns, so you can publish new content accordingly. Try, try and try again until you hit that sweet spot and get the results you want.
4. Social media is quiet on weekends: Now this may seem contradictory, but when people have free time people to do what they want, such as the weekend when they aren’t at work, they spend less time checking in on social media. Posting your most important news or engaging posts on the weekend might not be the best idea. Save it for the weekdays when people are checking more often.
5. The weekend can pay off: At the same time, weekend deliveries via snail mail can pay off, since there is typically less mail delivered on the weekends, especially for small businesses that may not be able to compete with the big budget of more established companies.

Timing out the individual elements of your campaign ironically takes up a lot of your own time. There are so many components to setting up a good, effective campaign, but timing is so important to your success, we recommend not overlooking this key aspect of planning. Catching your potential customers at the right place, in the right time, in the right frame of mind is what will lead you to more engaging content and the positive results you want. Timing really is everything…at least when it comes to marketing.

If coordinating the timing of all these different things seems like too big of a task, we’d love to help! Crafting and executing editorial calendars for our clients is something we enjoy doing.