In Marketing, Time Is Everything

Time is important to business. It’s even more so in regards to your marketing: an improperly timed campaign will fall on deaf ears, no matter how great your offer is. Your ongoing marketing efforts can suffer as well if you fail to take into account when your audience is prepared to digest your marketing materials. If you are sharing these materials at inopportune times, they will get lost amongst the various other marketing communications that your clients and prospects are receiving from other businesses, including those from your competition.

To make sure that doesn’t happen, you need to consider when you market, not just what you are marketing.

Timing Your Campaigns

For the marketing campaigns that you run, you need to consider when the campaign is running, the duration of the campaign, and how you should time out each marketing material you send out. In regards to determining when to run a campaign, consider the following:

• Seasonality - Shaping your campaigns around one of the four seasons can help you frame your campaign around what your audience is feeling as the weather changes. This can be especially valuable for MSPs that are located in areas that get extreme weather: so, when hurricane season strikes or a harsh winter is coming, you can run a BDR campaign to remind them how important having a business continuity plan is. 

• Official Holidays - Structuring a campaign around a particular holiday can be a great way to make the recipient of your marketing materials more receptive to your offer. For example, if you wanted to do a campaign around the Christmas season, consider using phrasing that encompasses the act of gift-giving. Or, if your campaign is set to go out around Halloween Time, use phrasing like “scary” or “frightening” to convince the recipients of your campaign materials to sign up for your services so they will be safe. 

• Other Relevant Holidays / Events - As an MSP, you can take advantage of various tech-themed holidays or anniversaries to frame your campaign around. For example, April 25th is National Telephone Day. So, you could run a VoIP campaign near the end of April. And, the Ethernet was invented on May 22nd - a great way to work in a campaign centered around infrastructure.

You should be running at least one campaign each quarter to ensure that your company’s name and service offerings stay top of mind. A marketing plan can help you do this. Make sure your campaign’s duration is reasonable so it remains effective - about 6 weeks is best if you utilize multiple marketing channels - and that your campaign materials are reasonably spaced out.

Timing Your Ongoing Efforts

Much of the marketing your company does probably involves ongoing digital marketing efforts in the form of blog posts, social media posts, and emails. The digital space is full of B2B marketers just like you that are taking advantage of these same mediums. So, consider timing these efforts during the times of the day that they are likely to get the most traction. 

• Your Blogs: Most users read blogs throughout the day, but the highest percentage of users read blogs in the morning. Specifically, blogs posted on Monday mornings tend to get the most traffic. This is contingent on whether or not you are posting frequently enough - you should be posting at least twice per week. Otherwise, readers won’t be looking for your posts. 

• Your Social Media Posts: The optimal social media posting times vary depending on what your end goal is and what platform you are utilizing. According to research:

Aim to post at least once a day for better reach, engagement, and click-through rates, especially for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. 

• Your eNewsletter and Email Blasts: Your eNewsletter mailing list is likely made up of the work emails of your clients and prospects. So, if you send an email late Friday afternoon, most are not going to see it until Monday morning (unless they are actively checking their work emails on the weekends like dedicated CEOs and company owners will). Overall, the best time to send emails seems to be between 6AM and 10AM according to research. But, this may vary depending on the content of the email. For example, it’s been found that emails about financial services perform best between 2PM and 3PM. In terms of frequency, aim for between 1-4 emails per month to receive the highest CTR and the lowest unsubscribe rate. 

But, just because the above is what “research” considers to be best doesn’t mean it’s actually best for your company. Continuously monitor your traffic and look for days and times where you seem to get more traction than others. Utilizing tools such as Hootsuite and MailChimp can help you determine the optimal times to post on social media and send emails, respectively. You can conduct A/B testing as needed using different times.

And, you shouldn’t just be communicating during these optimal times. You need to communicate throughout the week on a frequent basis at varied times. Otherwise, you might miss out on reaching those clients that check for business communications outside of peak times.

Don’t Forget To Be Timely

In addition to sending things at optimal times, you need to be prompt in your communication efforts. So, when someone engages with one of your social media posts or comments on one of your blogs, respond promptly. When someone downloads one of your whitepapers, make sure that they receive further communication from you as soon as possible so a potential lead isn’t lost to your competition. You can better do this by automating some of your marketing efforts. For the efforts that you can’t automate, make sure that you are checking for engagement on a frequent basis so that no client or prospect is left in the dark.

When it comes down to it, the act of timing your marketing right often involves a lot of trial and error. Do your research and keep trying to figure out what works best for you. And, if you need further help, our team is here. Reach out to us today.