Peaking on time: the importance of planning and co-ordinating your online marketing

Published on January 09, 2011 Peaking on time: the importance of planning and co-ordinating your online marketing

Getting your marketing strategy and tactics right is more than just analysing your customers, understanding their needs, developing an offering that appeals to them and a way of communicating it – it’s about co-ordinating all the pieces of your marketing effort together so that they work for maximum effect. And not peaking too early.

Timing is very important, especially if you are a small business with limited budget. If your efforts are out-of-synch you will be wasting money on advertising or your time and effort spent. Here are some things to think about when doing your maketing co-ordination and planning:

1. Break your planning into sections with milestones you have to achieve.
2. Use some planning software, through either your desktop calendar or a wall chart to keep you on track. If you fall behind on your milestones, you’ll either be scrambling close to your delivery deadline or will miss it altogether
3. Look at what happened last year. If you have an industry event every year, when did your competitors start advertising for it last year, what did they do? What did you like and dislike about their marketing efforts?
4. If you have multiple people, talk to each other! Don’t all rush off in separate directions. Have a regular meeting where you have to report to the others how you are getting on – there’s nothing like peer pressure to keep you focussed
5. If you are working by yourself then use your calendar to keep you focussed. Make it really annoy you until you get what you need to get done finished. If you have promised something on your website keep to it or you’ll be sorry later
6. If you are relying on other parties for your marketing effort, allow a contingency (a real contingency) as others might let you down, even if it’s unintentional
7. Use project planning software if you are doing a major project. It looks pretty complicated if you’re not used to it, but it can really help you in the long run. If you don’t want to go that far, use a software bug tracker to plot all the things you need to do and assign them to people. It’s not ideal for all business situations unless you are a software company, but better than paper planning as it can keep track of more than you can
8. Plan backwards not forwards – start at your end goal and work out the things that MUST happen to achieve that. This is called your critical path. The things that can happen in parallel are not as critical and can move in timing to work around your critical path
9. Stay inspired – use music to keep you motivated

Musical inspiration

There’s a great piece of classical music called “In the Hall of the Mountain King” (search for it on You Tube if you haven’t heard it before) that is a great symbol of peaking at the right time. It was designed for a particular scene in a play, starting very slowly and deeply, repeating the same block of music (theme in music speak) over and over, with more instruments joining in as the piece goes on. It keeps repeating and speeding up as the piece goes on. Getting louder and louder too, until at the end it has peaked to its maximum: full speed and full loudness. Peak performance and unison of the whole orchestra. It’s a great inspirational piece of music and very symbolic of what we’re talking about here for planning your marketing efforts so that when you launch a new product line or run a campaign you get the timing right.  Even if you don’t normally listen to classical music, it’s worth listening to.