The importance of planning your marketing campaigns early

Marketing campaigns tend to work better when there's enough time to think through them and not rush them out. This requires getting them ready ahead of the time.

Based on Shopify's surveys, around mid-year many of the larger Shopify stores start to plan out their Black Friday and winter holiday campaigns. That gives them almost half a year to brainstorm, design, and develop them. No wonder they post results that are the envy of their competitors.

In the past I recommended creating a growth calendar to plan out your marketing year. Even if all you have are broad sketches of campaigns, that can help you start to plan them out early.

Today's tip is to take another approach to the problem. Instead of looking at the calendar first, think about how many campaigns you can realistically produce in a year.

Let's say you and your team can create six solid campaigns.

That could be one every other month but it doesn't have to be. You might have two campaigns in November and December, one for Black Friday and one for Christmas. You might decide that January you'll have no campaign as your team deals with returns, exchanges, and just recharges their batteries.

Maybe February brings a simple promotion to closeout inventory and then April for a start of spring.

Perhaps summertime your brand doesn't do much so you skip summer as a whole but join in during the back-to-school at the end of August.

That leaves you with one campaign you can slot into September or October. Maybe an early Black Friday campaign? Maybe a spooky Halloween or autumn harvest campaign?

By focusing your planning on how much you can accomplish first, it can become easy to pre-schedule those campaigns.

(This also makes it easy to plan a vacation. You know what those things are right? Those mythical things everyone else gets every now and then...)

You can also take your planning to another level by matching your campaign timing to when customers are actually buying. This is the basis of the Average Latency metric and Order Sequence Report in Repeat Customer Insights.

If you're not sure how many campaigns you can run each year, look back over the last 12 months and count the number you were able to launch.

Now adjust that number a bit to what you think you can do over the next 12 months. Where there others you hoped for but never got around to? Did you hire a new staff member who can help out? Was last year's instability just hell and things are finally back to normal?

Consistently developing, tweaking, and releasing campaigns and promotions will help your customers remember who you are and hopefully come back and buy again. No customer enjoys getting ghosted by a company they loved.

Eric Davis