Speak Directly To Your Customer

I have just come off writing a series of articles talking about how planning ahead might cause you trouble if you aren't willing to keep an open mind, so now I'm going to focus instead on why you should still plan ahead no matter what.

The general rule of thumb for marketing is that the more time you have to work with something the better the end product will be. Working on your marketing early also allows you to better look at the marketplace and end up with a more solid, effective marketing plan.

But an important detail of this as well is to know what parts of your marketing you can best plan for, and what parts might need to be changed. Something you can do is set up the printing and the type of marketing early on, but hold off on actually writing in what the sales or specials will be on the marketing until you get closer. This gives you some more freedom. Never print off the marketing too far in advance, because if something changes, you'll end up with a lot of marketing material you don't need anymore.

Instead set things up so when you need to put those finishing touches on it you can easily do so, and quickly get your material made and sent out.

I will say though that some marketing really can be fully completed rather early. Calendar printing provides a good example of this. You know right from the beginning when you're going to need your calendars, so you can start making them as early as you want. This won't change, so you don't have to worry about the date shifting on you.

Calendars naturally take longer to make because they're more complex as well, and the more time you devote to them the better your final calendar will be. You'll want to spend as much time as you can because this is a once a year marketing push. If you don't make the cut you have to wait a whole year before trying again.

The only concern I can think of here is that if you choose a topic for your calendar that someone else is using as well, your calendar might not be as effective, and you might need to do some last minute changes to alter things. This will only be the case if the topic is the primary selling point for getting people to pick up your calendars.

Let's say your reason for calendar printing was to fill it with good deals for people. Now it doesn't really matter what anyone else is doing, because the people picking up your calendars are doing so for the specials.

Find the best things to plan out in advance that you can do the most amount of work on. It's always nice to get something out of the way today so you don't have to worry about it anymore tomorrow.