Wednesday 1 August 2012

Marketing Campaigns: Make Sure the Time is Right

In recent weeks we have looked at how you can expand your online ecommerce store by carrying out a number of different marketing strategies to increase your traffic and sales.

While sending out marketing emails and posting content on social media is important in attracting new customers to your online store, the time of day you actually send out this material can have a big impact on how many people it reaches.

Different social media sites have different times of the day when they are most popular, some are popular during the day, while others may only have increased activity during the morning and evening. It is important to send out your content during the peak times for each platform to ensure maximum exposure. If you send out content during a period of the day when this platform is quiet, you are going reach much less customers. 

In order to plan out when and where you are going to send out your marketing material, lets take a look when certain platforms are at their busiest.

Facebook 


One of the biggest social media platforms with over 900 million users. However, most of these users will only check their accounts on the morning and on an evening during the week due to work commitments. For this reason, you should look to post share your content on Facebook at around 8-9am in the morning and 5-6pm in the evening. This will ensure that your content is seen by the highest possible amount of users that 'like' your page. 

While the majority of businesses operate during the week, try to also take advantage of Facebook's weekend traffic. Now, I know that after a long week of working hard, the last thing anyone wants to do is spend time posting work during our time off, but releasing content on a weekend is going to seriously help your overall exposure. Facebook receives the majority of its traffic during the weekend as most people tend to have more free time than during the week. However, the same time frame during the week also applies during the weekend with one exception. Saturday night is probably the busiest time for people during the week, meaning that a large amount of people will be out socialising with friends on an evening rather than going on Facebook. Look to send out your content during the mid-morning period between 9-11am. This will make sure your content is seen by people on the morning, but will also be fairly high up on peoples news feeds during the mid afternoon period. 

Twitter


While Twitter has much less followers than Facebook with 175 registered users, the times of use are much more frequent. Twitter tends to be something that people use ongoing throughout the day, with the lowest traffic periods tending to be on an evening. To ensure maximum potential reach you should look to send out your content anywhere between 8am and 7pm.

If you have a large amount of content to send out such as numerous articles or sales information, look to spread your content out during the day. As Twitter is platform that people use for the entire day, spreading your content out across this period ensures followers are aware of your business throughout the day, rather than just getting two of three posts in the morning and forgetting about it later.  

Email Marketing


For any small business, email marketing is still the most effective way to reach customers based on the number of customers reached and the cost to send out the content. Like Twitter, most businesses tend to only monitor their working hours. Also, first thing on the morning is when people go through the majority of their emails. Sending out your emails on the evening, will result in them not getting read until the morning. By that time they will be in the pile with the rest of the other marketing and information emails that other businesses have sent out, reducing the impact your email will have.

For the best results you should look to send out your emails during midday, so roughly between 12-2pm. This will allow your emails to be opened during that afternoon, meaning you will no have your emails grouped up with other marketing emails the next morning. 

Mobile Advertisements


While this is something that tends to be only used by bigger businesses as it can cost a lot to be effective, with 10% of all purchases made on your phone, it is definitely something any business should start to consider for future marketing plans.  Like all other marketing platforms, mobile advertisements are no different in having its own time of the day when it is successful. However, what time of day this is exactly is dependent on what type of business you run. For example, if your business provides food services, you should look to have your adverts appear during breakfast, lunch and dinner times as these are the periods of the day when the majority of people tend to be thinking about food. While if you run a clothing store, evening and weekend advertisements may be the way to go as these are the periods of time when people tend to have more free time to browse and purchase products. 

Getting the right message, to the right audience and at the right time of the day, is going to ensure that your marketing campaign receives maximum exposure, ultimately resulting in greater traffic and hopefully increased sales. 

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