The Christmas \/ New Year break. The two to four weeks where a lot of businesses shut down completely and relax. Well, if you are a big business that is. If you are a small lean business like us at Copy Express, you shut down because most of your suppliers and customers are shut down. It doesn\u2019t mean that you can completely rest because every day you are closed is another day you are not earning income or getting new clients. So if you are going to be \u2018paying\u2019 for the time you are closed it\u2019s a good opportunity to get the jump on your marketing planning for the new year. In this article I\u2019m going to suggest 5 todo items you can do for your marketing planning that doesn\u2019t take a lot of time to do, but will save you time and money in the future and make easier to keep on top of it when you are working again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s easy to plan for the public holidays, just hop over to the\u00a0New Zealand at Work website\u00a0and have a read. Not only do they have the actual and observed dates for public holidays current and next 5 years, they also do all the provincial anniversaries and highlight when Mondayized versions of holidays fall. If you are in a business that is effected by school kids being on holiday then the\u00a0Ministry of Education website<\/a>\u00a0list when they happen and what years get off when. If you also tie any marketing into local or regional events then visit your city or regional council website for they all have pages listing upcoming events. For us at Copy Express we look at not only look at the events listed by\u00a0Lower Hutt City Council<\/a>\u00a0but also\u00a0Upper Hutt City<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Wellington<\/a>\u00a0too. It\u2019s a smart idea to book a regular time in your diary to check these sites as they keep a rolling window of events of 4-8 weeks out allowing you plenty of time to get some special marketing prepared for a new event you may want join in on.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Having looked up when the holidays and events a going to take place, this is a great time to work out when the most important times for your marketing. Everyone has a limited budget for marketing, both in time and money, so by sorting out a list of dates from the most important, it allows for you to best allocate your resources to which marketing plans are the most important. It also gives you a rough idea if you have some \u2018slack\u2019 in your budget to allow for unexpected marketing needs. The list doesn\u2019t have to be a top ten either, put down as few or as many ideas or events you want to marketing for and then sort them out in order. Doing this will help you sort out what your market is and that may surprise you where you run a promotion if you haven\u2019t looked in to it too closely before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A marketing\/design bible is a cornerstone of all the big companies and should be part of your tool set too. In the most basic terms, the bible is a document that lists all the standards that a company uses when they use for any material that is created, from signage to stickers. Some design bibles have become so well known that they have created design movements (which are like art movements). For a small business, a design\/marketing bible is just a simple document that set down a series of rules how all your stuff looks. It\u2019s a list of the fonts you use, the colours, logos, and even examples of flyers, business cards, emails, etc. It does take a little time to set one of these up but then you will have the go to list of everything meaning that when you create something new, or ask a company like Copy Express to design something, it will speed up the process immensely and save a lot of guesswork.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve designed a lot of flyers for a lot of business and I\u2019ve found the best way to make your life easier when it come to doing them is to work from a template. It follows on from having a bible for your material as it speeds up the process, keeps a consistent look for everything, and all round results in a more professional looking job. You don\u2019t have to create finished fliers, just a basic framework that you can quickly adapt to each marketing project you have. If you don\u2019t feel confident in doing that, why not talk to us at Copy Express. We can design generic flyers templates for you in the application you feel most comfortable using with a simple guide of how to use the template<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes the best ideas for marketing are other peoples. Why not grab a box or a copy safe folder and have it to keep flyers and other marketing stuff you receive in the mail box. As stuff comes in anything you think is a really good design, gets the point across, or come from your competitors, why not keep it aside for ideas. Jot a few notes on it, maybe highlight what really caught your eye. If you want to go really all out maybe write up some notes on how you would have done that item or how you could use the same idea\/format. By doing this you will have a great idea of what works and what you can use that suits your style of business. The Christmas \/ New Year break. The two to four weeks where a lot of businesses shut down completely and relax. Well, if you are a big business that is. If you are a small lean business like us at Copy Express, you shut down because most of your suppliers and customers are shut down. … Continue reading “5 Marketing to-do\u2019s for the Summer Holiday”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":785,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[35],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1658,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions\/1658"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}2. Write up a \u2018top-10 events\u2019 list<\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
3. Set up a Marketing\/Design \u2018Bible\u2019<\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
4. Create a set of Generic Flyers<\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
5. Setup of an idea book\/box<\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
So that\u2019s the 5 to do list item for your summer holidays. It doesn\u2019t have to take too much time, but in return could save you a lot of time when you are busy working again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"