Tweet

Guerrilla Timing

Guest post by: Jay Conrad Levinson

Article Overview: If your marketing is right, but your timing is wrong, watch out. Even the best-laid plans go awry when the timing is off. Here's how to prevent that.

Guerrilla Timing

If your marketing is right, but your timing is wrong, watch out. Even the best-laid plans go awry when the timing is off. Here's how to prevent that.
Sometimes a company actively markets the right product or service to the right people in the right media. But the marketing turns out to be a flop all because of poor timing. In order to get the most mileage from your marketing, you've got to be keenly attuned to the right times and the wrong times. To gain a bit of insight, consider these ten examples:


You've created the perfect mailing package, but it arrives too early in the week, when your prospect is thinking of the week ahead -- or too late, when your prospect is thinking of the upcoming weekend. Moral: See to it that your mailing arrives on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.

You've got a fine product but a limited budget and a lot of competition. What to do? Do your marketing when your competitors have eased up and you can gain the largest share of mind with the smallest marketing investment. Maybe that will be during what are deemed the slow months. But it's when you can attract the most attention the fastest.

Everybody receives Christmas catalogs in September and October. If you sent yours during July or August, you'd get people thinking of your company then and later on as well. It's may sound a bit crazy, but if you explain why you are mailing at that time, it will make sense to your prospects. Naturally, this applies to times other than Christmas.

You keep abreast of current events by watching the tube, reading the paper, accessing online news services, perusing newsweeklies, and subscribing to publications within your industry and community. You should be doing this, and if you do, you can tie in your offerings with what is happening at that moment in history. A recession is ugly except to companies that realize it is an ideal opportunity for them to make sales.

Be careful not to launch your marketing too soon. One of the most common errors in marketing is to promote before all the bugs have been worked out, before the salespeople know all the facts, and before you are ready to fill the flood of orders and engage in guerrilla follow-up. Remember that patience is a guerrilla virtue.

One of the saddest moments in marketing is the snazzy newspaper story or big time TV report about the products or services that are not yet available. The business owner is so enthralled at the thought of free publicity that the news is released before people can buy what he or she offers. They won't come back another time, and the media won't give you another splash. Restraint is necessary even with free news coverage.

Savvy retailers wait at least one month before having their grand openings. If they don't wait, customers will come flocking in to become acquainted with untrained salespeople, poorly stocked shelves, slow delivery times, clumsy sales procedures and messy surroundings. Polish these items to perfection before your grand opening or it won't be so grand. Guerrillas are rarely in hurry.

Telemarketing calls that don't get through or that reach answering devices are wastes of time and money. Find out when your prospects are most likely to be at the phone, and then do your telemarketing. It may be at 11:00 a.m. to businesses and 6:30 p.m. to homeowners. The first goal of a phone call is to reach the prospect.

Use speed in the timing you use to deal with customer requests, orders, questions and complaints. People revere their time these days more than ever. Revere it with them and never waste one minute of theirs.

Never be in a rush to create your marketing materials. Keep in mind that to develop them, you are faced with three variables -- speed, quality and economy. You may select any two, but not all three. Guerrillas opt for quality and economy very time.

Timing also refers to tying in with the news of the moment, with what's on your prospect's minds, and with what your competitors are doing. Guerrilla timing can make the difference between a campaign fizzling or flourishing.

Related Articles
  The Way of the Guerrilla
  Downturns and Guerrillas
  What is Marketing in the First Place?
  Are you a Guerrilla
  What Is Guerrilla Marketing?
  The Designated Guerrilla
  Monumental Secrets of Guerrilla Marketing – Tactics
  Guerrilla Marketing And Karate
  Growing Geometrically
  GUERRILLA SOFT STEPS
  Follow-Up or Fall on Your Face
  Fusion Marketing
  Your Mission
  Memorize These 12 Words Then Live By Them
  The Big Lie
  Guerrilla Publicity
  Always Do A Timing Check Before You Begin A New Venture
  Guerilla Marketing Weapons by Jay Conrad Levinson
  Advertising No Longer Has to Make the Sale
  The New Secrets of Guerrilla Marketing

Article Tags: best laid plans, budget, christmas, christmas catalogs, current events, guerrilla, insight, mailing package, marketing, mileage, news services, offerings, prospects, recession, share of mind, tuesday wednesday



Related Forum Posts
Where's the Entrance? - that's true I've been seeing a lot of construction going on to the City of Toronto's sidewalks and even Movie shoots sometimes block of access to stores for a week sometimes.. Guerrilla techniques should be at play here. 1. Get a Can of Paint and some Footstep Stencils and paint footsteps all the way from the accessible street right to your temporary entrance. (may be illegal but the store owner could plead innocent and say he has no idea who did that - maybe a "fan" of the restaurant) 2. I remember when there was the SARS outbreak in Toronto a lot of the Chinese restaurants were not doing so well except for Lee's Garden. I noticed they created a special Menu with prepackaged Menu Items for $20. 3. Create some buzz like with a Unique expereince - "Someone stole all my Plates! Now serving food on Banana Leaves - Guess What! The Food tastes better than ever! Blah Blah...
Top 19 Copywriting books - 1. Ogilvy on Advertising. David Ogilvy. Wiley. 2. Positioning: The Battle for your Mind. Al Ries and Jack Trout. Warner. 3. The New Positioning. Jack Trout. McGraw-Hill. 4. Tested Advertising Methods. John Caples. Prentice-Hall. 5. How to Make your Advertising Make Money. John Caples. Prentice-Hall. 6. Guerrilla Advertising. Jay Conrad Levinson. Houghton Mifflin. 7. Direct Mail Copy that Sells. Herschell Gordon Lewis. Prentice-Hall. 8. Sales Letters that Sizzle. Herschell Gordon Lewis. NTC Business Books. 9. Herschell Gordon Lewis on the Art of Writing Copy. Herschell Gordon Lewis. Prentice-Hall. 10. Romancing the Brand. David Martin. American Management Association. 11. The Art of Writing Advertising: Conversations with William Bernbach, Leo Burnett, George Gribbin, David Ogilvy, Rosser Reeves. NTC Business Books. 12. Confessions of an Advertising Man. David Ogilvy. NTC Business Books. 13. My Life in Advertising. Claude Hopkins. NTC Business Books. 14. Scientific Advertising. Claude Hopkins. NTC Business Books. 15. How to Become an Advertising Man. James Webb Young. NTC Business Books. 16. The Lasker Story as He Told It. NTC Business Books. 17. Advertising Concept and Copy. George Felton. Prentice Hall. 18. The Copy WorkShop Workbook. Bruce Bendinger. The Copy Workshop. 19. Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: A Guide to Creating Great Ads. Luke Sullivan. Wiley. This should keep you busy for at least a year. Enjoy!
SES Toronto Day 2 - Well I’m off to Day 2 of Search Engine Strategies 2008. Here is what I have planned to attend today: 10:30am-11:45am - Search User Behavior How do searchers interact with search engines? New research is constantly revealing how searchers act. This session explores the latest studies and findings to provide tips and tactics for search marketers to consider. 12:45pm-2:00pm - SEM Toolkit: Marketers Share Competitive intelligence, keyword research, customer profiling, exotic analytics, and visual mouse tracking are just some of the tricks of the trade of search marketers. Guerrilla marketers on the panel show you the favorite tools in their kits. Many are low cost or free. 2:30pm-3:45pm - Web 2.0 & Search Engines An overused and amorphous term, “Web 2.0? nonetheless encompasses an evolutionary shift from the typical web user experience of a decade ago. Some aspects of the “new” web environment are great for improving your search traffic. Other developments may lead you to make serious SEO errors. Among other things, Web 2.0 is about new user interface designs that speed up user actions with techniques such as AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML), which allow users to perform operations nimbly without loading a new HTML page. This session will cover AJAX, CSS, user-generated content, and other new trends in web design and user experiences that may require a re-think of your SEO strategy. 4:00pm-5:15pm - Site Clinic This interactive session takes volunteers from the audience and examines their websites live to provide general feedback about improving them to gain more traffic from search engines. As usual I’ll report my findings after the day is through!


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Top Ten Feeble Follow-up Attempts to Fathom

Winning Market Share in a Tough Economy

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.