08.01.2013
- The strange revelation came to me last Friday. I found out
from my colleague, that our company CEO was actually one of the employed engineers
in our biggest competitor’s company. It appears, that after some inner feud or
just wishing to start their business in their own, he and a few of his
teammates left the company and started on their own, with the same premise and
almost with the same product and services, but under another name and with
another brand. Now their ex-employers are our main competitors, which, as I
thought earlier, were copying our ideas and strategies. Now the question arises:
who's copying whom and who's copy who is? One thing is certain - they do pay
attention to us. That means they recognize us as a threat, not just an
unpleasant nuisance.
- Marketing calendar
for the next six months is done. Now it's only up to my boss to check it and
make some finalization notes. But the main work is done: I've made a complete
schedule of our marketing activity for the next half a year, including email
campaigns, press-release publishing, social networks (Facebook, Google+, Twitter,
Linkedin) announcements, website updates, etc. I've counted the most
appropriate week for every announcement, trying to avoid too much overlapping
(sending one e-mail campaign per week is optimal) and thus covered all our
online/classroom trainings and one major conference-like event, that will take
place at the early June. I also grouped each month online trainings in separate
mail campaigns, hoping that it will 1) Save our marketing campaigns from
overlapping; 2) Clear some space for potential unpredictable events, that will require
marketization as well (and, having in mind my boss' creative marketing genius,
they will be not long in coming); 3) Cover all our online trainings, which, due
to their number and frequency, were usually overlooked and had no time/space
for proper announcement.
- Next step with optimizing marketing calendar was adding
automatic color signification system. By creating rules in the Conditional
Formatting menu, I've attached a different color for an appropriate date (this
week - red, next week - orange, the week after next week - yellow, etc., to
purple, which is 7th or something week forward) by using formulas like
"Cell Value ... between ... =NOW()+13 ... =NOW()+18 ... [Yellow]" and
so on. For this formula to work I choose the cellular data format to
"Date" (this is crucial) and selected all cells with data for rules
to attach. Can't say that this formulas is perfect - once or twice a week they
should be slightly edited in order to work smoothly. So it's more
"semi-automatic" system, if you will. But anyway, these are the best
that i've come up with a few months ago, when I was making my first marketing
calendar. Until now it helped me a lot, and it did satisfy my boss (adjusting colors
to date cells and making them change automatically was his idea originally),
which is all for good.
- Don't forget about holidays! I almost did, and it's wrong.
I've noticed it just in time, before sending to my boss, and decided to fix
this nuisance oversight. Since we're sending emails to five different regions:
USA, Europe, Asia and India, four appropriate Wikipedia articles were studied
for 2013 holidays. Thankfully, no major changes were needed.
- My boss throws a party. Usually that would be not of my
concern, but this time is different. He throws parties for his clients / colleagues
in the field, where he, in his own words, will try to "drunk them and
get something useful out of them".
Cunning marketing move, no more, no less. Makiavelian, I would even say.
- One more update to the marketing schedule: to make
classroom trainings announcements more frequent (since it's our primary
educational direction) and more beforehand (since it takes a lot of time for
our clients to squeeze money out of their bosses and to prepare for a far away journey).
With my boss’ advice, I decided to combine some announcements in one email
campaign. If earlier there were only two email campaigns for every classroom
based training (one main, month before, and one final reminder, two weeks
before), now there are three campaigns for each (training A final reminder
combined with training B first announcement, training B main announcement,
training B final announcement combined with training C first announcement...
and so on).
