Tips on how to prevent your marketing from derailing

Changes in staffing can have a surprising number of knock on effects on how your business, not just because you have to replace them and train up someone new. There is the shift social dynamics, covering holidays and sick leave, lost of valuable associated skills that help side jobs run more smoothly, the list goes on. What ends up sitting at the bottom of that list as it can also effect how you do your marketing. We recently had a very dramatic example of it happen to us over the last six months. So we want to help you learn from our mistakes so you won’t have the same problems we have.

Have the processes written down so people can follow them

This is a simple step that a lot of people miss. It doesn’t have to be complex document outlining everything step by step, thought that the idea, it could be as simple as where to find the files to create the documents, contacts of who does the printing and design work, log on details to the website and the social media pages. They can be all setup in a word document on a computer, put into a cloud drive, printed off and put into a folder where everyone can find it. It might take a day to set it up but when it’s done you only need to updated it as how you marketing changes. It’s the perfect for one of the tasks of the person leaving has to do in their last days.

Have other people learn the process

While having the processes written down is vital, having people shown how to do it is also important. Being able to understand what to do and feel confident in doing it is vital to make the process run as smoothly as possible. I would recommend that several people learn how to handle the marketing process to a basic level, that way if the main person is away for any reason someone else can take over and keep things ticking over. A nice bonus is if you have several different people learn how to do it, they can come up with ways of making the process run smoother, and offer ideas for different promotions that one person by themselves may not think of.

Standardize layouts of material and use templates

Modern office software will let you set up quite complex templates that all you to fill in the blanks and have a ready to go document in a few minutes. A lot of graphic software supports making images that are ready to upload straight to social media. Copy Express own Web To Print system is design to support templates, so with some simple design work, anyone in your business could log on to your account, fill in the blanks of a flyer and place the order in one easy process.

Have generic offers ready to run at a moment’s notice

While in an ideal world everyone should be doing carefully planned promotions that ensure the most customers take up the offer, that takes time which you don’t have. Having more general offers that target a range of products or services will make things more flexible while requiring less effort to set up. Use coupons codes and redirections to the website or facebook page to set out the terms and conditions, especially things the offer period, so that way you can control the offer with minimal effort on your part.

Preload promotions to cover the changeover period

As a large amount of promotion is done online these days, yes even us a print company does a lot of it, this gives you a lot of flexibility. A lot of systems allow you to preload promotions weeks and even months in advance with automated start and stop dates and even notification direct to your clients. Have a look at the services that your providers offers, it might cost you a little to have it set up but it will free up your time when it’s the most critical making a worthwhile investment.

That’s been few helpful tips to make sure that your marketing stays on track through the upheaval of changes of staff. If you want to make use of more of our hard earned experience then give us a call at Copy Express and book a time for a chat.