Finalizing Marketing Schedule - Tuesday, the 8th of January

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).