Marketing Planning Saves Money, Time and Improves Results

Save money in half an hour! 

This may sound as unbelievable but there really IS a way to save LOTS of money in a very short amount of time!

Let me take you through the 3 steps:

1. In the beginning of the year, use your diary and mark all the important dates for your company. For instance important events, conferences, markets, specials, etc. Maybe your business will be celebrating a milestone or an anniversary.
2. Now page back to 4 weeks before these dates and mark them.
3. On those dates you start getting your promotional material ready! Flyers, posters, advertising, social media exposure, website updates - whichever marketing tools you use. THIS is the day you set aside to focus on one of the most important tools for your business - MARKETING.

These 3 steps shouldn’t take more than half an hour. Remember, you are just marking these dates, you do not need to brainstorm the event now. And how does this save me the money you may ask? Well, not only do you save money but you’re saving yourself a ton of stress. In the 17+ years I’ve been in the marketing and advertising industry I have seen so many clients in tears…and why? They’ve run out of TIME to have their marketing material ready for a big event.

This gets us to WHY are you saving money when planning ahead. The Iron Triangle.

These are the options: Time, Quality, and Cost. And you can only ever have two of the three options. The triangle reveals the fact that the three properties of a project or business scope are related, and it is not possible to achieve all three - one will always suffer.

In other words, you have three options:

• Design something quickly and with quality - you will pay more.
• Design something quickly and cheaply - it will not be high-quality work.
• Design something with high quality and cheaply - you will have to wait longer.

No one wants inferior quality work and we’ve established that we’re here to save money, so that leaves us with the timeframe. When you start planning earlier for your event, as marked in your diary, you WILL get the best prices, for quality work! And that’s how you save money!

Written By: Joh-Mari van Heerden