Planning Your Marketing, 2021 Edition

A beginners guide on planning out your marketing in the digital age

Back in 2013 I wrote an article about ‘6 Easy Steps to Planning Your Marketing’. It was a basic introduction to how to plan your marketing for those who had no idea where to start. Since then many things have changed in the marketing landscape and it was about time to update it with eight years of experience that I want to share with you.

State of the marketplace: 2013 vs 2021

What has changed for businesses marketing themselves in the years between 2013 and 2021?  Especially for the small to medium sized businesses.

When I wrote the article, print marketing was still strong at the time. Our mailboxes were still getting stuffed with mailers, the newspapers were filled with ads. A lot of people found business through those newspaper ads or listings in the yellow pages. The internet was just a place to still have your name there but you didn’t do much with it. Social media was just starting to become the medium that could help or hurt your business by how they used it. (Facebook had only become available to the general public in 2007.) And businesses were beginning to seriously explore using email as a means of communication for both information and marketing.

Since then we have seen the wind down of the mailbox mailer to the point the postal service is almost gone too. Smart phones have taken over the role as the primary means of communication for both businesses and personal needs. Newspapers are digital and straddle the line between text and video. The Yellow Pages of the phone book are practically dead. If you don’t have a website that can be found on net search, your business is practically dead too. Email advertising is now worse than the mailbox flyers at their peak. And businesses need to have social media to stand a real chance of being found by new clients.

So how do you plan your marketing in 2020’s?

Now when I talk about marketing, I mean the concept that everything you do online or in the physical world is a type of marketing. So it’s not just sending out emails or flyers. It’s the posts on your Facebook or Twitter feed, the way you interact with customers, packaging that has your branding, the articles or videos you post on line to explain what you do and your business. All of this is marketing and all of it needs to be planned to a degree to make sure you’re getting the maximum effect for the minimum amount of time and money.

Accept you’re part of the noise

The fact is with the move over to digital marketing as the primary means of advertising, it’s easier than ever for businesses to advertise, and a lot cheaper too. This has resulted in a very noticeable increase in the total volume of advertisements a person will experience on a given day. If you are marketing then you’re going to be part of that volume, with much of it from businesses that have dedicated teams and huge budgets to put into promotion. So how can you compete with that?

If you look at all industries there are certain times of the week, month, or year that are more heavily advertised than others. When these are depends on the industry, but they all reflect their customers spending patterns. Look at your business, when do people spend more than other times? When do your competitors make more social media posts or put out marketing campaigns? This can dictate when you should have marketing out there.

Your first reaction might be to have your marketing out at the same time as the big players in your industry. This can be a mistake, as they will have the power to reach out further and do more than your average small to medium sized business. Yes, have something out there to remind customers about you, but keep it simple and not try to compete. Instead look at when your existing customers spend and plan to have marketing out a few days before those peak spending points to remind all your customers that you are there.

Less is more

Another easy to fall into trap is the temptation to put lots of marketing material, be it emails, social media posts, buying online ads. The cost can be minimal for the volume of what gets sent out. This is dangerous as you can quickly go from interesting and informative to annoying if you send out too much over a period of time.  We cover it in more detail in our article ‘Are you putting yourself in the Spam Folder?’ but here’s a few basic thoughts on the matter.

People’s time is worth more to them than you are, so if you annoy them they will give their future business to someone else. Also if you put too much out, people will start ignoring you as they get ‘tired of’ seeing so much from your business. The majority of your effort for digital marketing is to keep you ranking high on search results, and it will not directly generate sales, so above a certain level of effort it’s not going to have any direct effect on those results.

The majority of digital marketing tends to be short ‘snackable’ content, not direct advertising; short videos, simple posts no longer than a few hundred words, a few photos. These can be quick to consume and refreshes the existence of your business in people’s mind. They are generally easier to produce and don’t require as much finishing work as a long form video or article like this. This allows for a higher frequency of posting without hitting the annoyance limit, sometimes daily but generally on a weekly or fortnightly basis. Longer content like an article or longer videos, should be limited to fortnightly or monthly schedules since they take up more time to consume. As for direct advertising, unless you are a large retailer with constant rolling sales, use them very sparingly so it becomes an event when your customers see it.

Have a basic quarterly or yearly plan

The instant nature of digital marketing leads to the temptation of reactive marketing, that is creating marketing when you think of it or when a competitor does it. The reality is that you should never do that. Good marketing takes planning and reviewing before you let it out into the world. Ignoring the fact that the internet never forgets any mistakes you make, more likely is that you are just going to end up wasting your time and money in a period when your customers aren’t interested in buying your products or services. So having a basic schedule for when your marketing goes out is vital.

Again this is a subject of it’s own article but here’s the basics to get you started. Looking at when you have your peak sales, so you have advertising to go out just before or at the start of that peak. Also look at the largest competitors and when they put their effort into marketing, so you know to put out material to remind customers that you’re there too. Public and school holidays will have an effect on your business, either positive or negative, so visit both the Employment New Zealand and Ministry of Education website to see when they occur. If there are other public events that have an effect on your business (for example National Field Days) then putting marketing around it, even if it’s not promotional or sales related, is a good way to keep your business in people’s minds.

Put this into a calendar you use all the time to remind you when you need to have marketing out by. This will not only make sure you have material out there, but prompt you to keep looking for content you can use to meet those objectives.

Preload during the quiet times

Following on from having a quarterly or yearly plan for your marketing, you should have your material ready to go well before it’s needed. If you want physical material then you will have to allow for time for printing companies like us at Copy Express to be able to produce it. Digital marketing has the advantage of preloading items well ahead of time so that they automatically go out when you want them to. All businesses have quieter periods, so it makes sense to use that time to generate the content for your marketing then. It also gives you the opportunity to work on it at your own pace and take time for you or someone else to review it before it goes out. The reality is that a simple little marketing post might need a rewrite or two to make sure you aren’t setting yourself up for an expensive mistake or just make yourself look silly.

Always have something ready for instant use

While ideally you should have all of your marketing materials ready and uploaded well ahead of time, there are situations where you need to put something out now. This is where social media like Facebook are really useful for a business. Most people are a bit more forgiving on the quality of a social media post as they are considered more ‘off the cuff’ and personal. The rule with a good post is, as I like to say, ‘You don’t have to be perfect, you just have to be interesting.’ So a short video, a photo or two, short text, are really good for that ‘just in time’ marketing. Just don’t go overboard with it, as I cover here in ‘Are you putting yourself in the Spam Folder?’

Talk to your customers

It’s easier than ever to get feedback from your customers. Don’t be afraid to have a chat with them when they come in person to you. Look at the likes and posts of your social media posts. If they have come from competitors, find out what prompted them to change to your business. These are all simple passive tools to find out what they think about your business and it’s marketing. What do you do to be more proactive? Ask people to comment on service on your website. Have survey pages on your site, or send out questionnaires emails. Look at how you are being found via searches.

The goal is to find out when people are the most responsive and how often they respond. It does take time for someone to sit down and survey your existing customers to find out what they feel about your marketing, like us at Copy Express. Still, using these simple tools will give you a good idea when are the best times to make your marketing pushes.

In Conclusion

• Accept you’re part of the noise
  You will have competition in every medium you choose to put your marketing effort in. Do not just look at when others do their marketing, but when they are quiet. Match that to when you have the most business and use that to pick the times you should put marketing out there
• Less is more
  It is better to put in a little less marketing than too much. You want to be a point of interest, not a point of annoyance. Remember people value their time more than you, so treat it with respect by not wasting it. A few well spaced items of longer content with the occasional short ‘snackable’ bit in between will go a long way to make an impact than being in their feeds every other day.
• Have a basic quarterly or yearly plan and schedule your work
  While digital marketing allows you to make instant responses to situations, you can also use it to schedule your work. This allows you to make use of your quieter times to do a bit of marketing work and spend time to get it right and leave to go out while you’re busy with customers. By analyzing when are your peak busy times you can then ensure that customers are reminded of you. In the quiet times you can have content to help drive sales.
• Always have something ready for instant use
  Sometimes you need a response to something your competitors are doing. Having some extra content or some reliable specials you can bring out at a moment’s notice helps with keeping your business in the minds of customers.

This is just the start of the process of planning your marketing. It’s a rabbit hole that is very deep and twisted and all too easy to get lost in. These basic guidelines I’ve given here will help you on your way. If it seems too much or you just can’t be bothered to deal with it all, then why not talk to us at Copy Express. We can help you with the process and even take all of it off your hands. Why not reach out to us today.

Accept you’re part of the noise