It’s Tuesday, and with Tuesday comes a different set of stresses than with Monday. If you’re an entrepreneur – or manager of any sort – Tuesday is the day when the rest of the week comes into focus, and you realize how much crap stuff you have to accomplish before the weekend arrives.
Among your to-do’s are marketing tasks (hopefully) that will keep your customers rolling in. Activities like:
- monthly/quarterly mailings
- attending events or trade shows
- updating your company website and blog
- creating a seasonal product catalog
- making presentations/sales calls
- sending email newsletters
- advertising
When things get busy, we (yes, even us designers) tend to procrastinate marketing our businesses in order to get through the rest of our tasks. However, even when things are hectic, you should still be focused on promoting your business.
Making a calendar at the beginning of each year that outlines your marketing efforts helps you stay on track, while also helping you budget for any design and printing costs. This can be done quarterly as well, to the same effect (my preferred method), and allows you to be more nimble with your decisions.
By planning your marketing efforts in advance, you can reap some cost savings by:
- ganging up your print jobs for mailings (saves resources, too!)
- having a general brand overview piece on hand to send to prospects and take to meetings
- resizing one design for multiple trade show booth layouts
- qualifying for discounts from your mail house for scheduled catalog mailings
- creating a single branded email newsletter template that is ready for monthly content
- having a standard advertisement design that can resized and sent to publications on the fly
- not paying rush charges when you’re behind the 8-ball!
Thanks for the reminder to work on my own marketing. I have become better at this, but still let it slip when things get busy. I’m still not organized enough to plan for a whole year, but maybe a quarter at a time ;-)
Eryn, Some great reminders here. You’re totally right, you get busy with work, marketing takes a back seat, then the next thing you know, 2 months from now there’s no work!