Developing a Marketing Calendar

When’s the best time to develop a marketing calendar for the year? As they say, there’s no time like the present. By Al Lautenslager
January 31, 2007

Just because we’re approaching February doesn’t mean it’s too late to plan your marketing for the year. Jay Levinson, my Guerrilla Marketing in 30 Days co-author says there are two best times to develop a marketing plan: right now and whenever your business started. Since we can’t go back in time, let’s focus on right now.

Marketing is complicated. To make effective use of its many strategies and components, you have to first plan them out, then stay organized and consistent in implementing your plan. A marketing calendar is the best way to organize your marketing activity; the calendar also serves as a working document you can revise and update throughout the plan year.

A marketing calendar doesn’t have to be fancy. I recommend a simple spreadsheet matrix. Across the top x-axis, I place column headings representing the months of the year. Down the y-axis, or the first left-hand column, I list each individual marketing initiative, event or activity I’ll use during the plan year.

For instance, if I’m going to do a press release every other month starting in February, I would put an X in the February, April, June, August, October and December columns. If I were going to issue a print newsletter once a month, each monthly column would have an X in it for that item.

How do you know which activities to include in your calendar? Brainstorm all the marketing ideas that make sense for your plan year but keep in mind that you can’t do everything. Balance your marketing workload with the other things you need to do for your business. Plan for what you can do completely, not halfway. Also plan what you feel comfortable with, emotionally and financially. Prioritize accordingly, then place your ideas in your matrix.

Using a marketing calendar allows you to do four things with your marketing:

1. It organizes, categorizes and prioritizes your marketing initiatives and activities.

2. It allows you to spot “bunches” in your marketing activity. Too many X’s close together might indicate the need to spread out your activity. It’s generally accepted, though, that there are natural bunches that occur as a result of seasonality in your business and your customers’ buying habits. Many retail operations market heavily in the third quarter, for instance, and bunch up marketing activity in anticipation for the fourth-quarter holiday season.
3. It offers a way for you to spot gaps in your marketing activity. Too much time in between the X’s in your activities leaves customers and prospects untouched. Your goal with marketing is to achieve top-of-mind awareness. Consistency is key here, as is repetition. Don’t have gaps in your marketing.
4. It allows you to more easily evaluate your marketing. At the end of the year, the quarter or any other period of time you specify, grade the individual activity and initiative items. You can use a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 being spectacular, or you can use a simple A, B or C grading system. If your particular initiative worked, grade it high. If it was moderately successful, give it a midlevel grade, and if it didn’t work, give it a low rating. Now here’s the real value of this activity: When you plan the next period’s marketing, repeat what worked or what you graded highly. Fix, modify or tweak the marketing that kind of worked or that was graded at a midlevel, and eliminate the marketing that didn’t work at all.

That’s all there really is to planning your marketing with a marketing calendar. Do what works for your business. Plan it quarterly if that’s easier for you than doing it monthly. Once you establish your marketing plan, keep it up on a regular basis, just like paying your bills. Consistent marketing wins out. Planned consistent marketing with effective implementation wins out even more. And if you didn’t start back when you launched your business, start now.

entrepreneur.com

The Real Value Of Vista

Microsoft’s new Windows will allow you to make the most of your digital media.

When Vista finally hits the shelves on Jan. 29, most consumers won’t have a clue why they should buy it. Never mind the fanfare it will receive as Microsoft Chairman William H. Gates III formally launches the new Windows from the stage of the Nokia Theater in New York. Or the hundreds of millions of dollars the software giant plans to spend through June to market it. With all of Vista’s many new features, Microsoft seems incapable of really zeroing in on the handful that will truly change the way consumers use their PCs.

Not that Vista won’t be a step forward. Just think back to what your PC was like five years ago when Windows xp launched. It was still the era of the Blue Screen of Death, that infamous window that popped up to say your PC had just crashed. Windows XP improved PC reliability. But in retrospect, the real breakthrough for consumers (those who didn’t already have a Mac, that is) was XP’s ability to help digitize their entertainment. Windows XP made it a snap to stash music, photos, and video online.

Windows XP pretty much stopped right there, though. Microsoft Corp. made it easy to rip a CD to your PC’s hard drive. But it took Apple Inc., with its iPod, to figure out how to actually take advantage of that digitization and make it easy for consumers to listen to their digital tunes. And forget about photos. Consumers have snapped scads of photos—2 billion in 2006 alone. But they remain trapped on hard drives of PCs running Windows XP. It’s not all that different than storing snapshots in shoeboxes under the bed.

Enter Vista. Let’s go out on a limb and suggest that for all the knocks against Microsoft and the jokes about how long it took to crank this thing out, Vista will in time be recognized as a leap past XP. And not just because it is far more secure and boots up more quickly. When consumers look back a few years from now, the Vista improvement they may be most likely to cite is the ability to actually use all that digital content they’ve been accumulating over the years.

The result of Microsoft’s efforts is a collection of devices and services that takes Windows a step closer to truly being a digital hub. Think once again about those photos. Microsoft has worked with a handful of partners that have developed digital picture frames that connect to PCs over a wireless network.

Sounds geeky. But Microsoft has made it easy for PCs to recognize the frames on a home network, so all users need to do is turn on the frame to connect with it. Then, from their PC, they can select which pictures to display on the frames scattered around the house. “A lot of the success of Vista will be up to the partners like us to make it dead simple,” says Jesse Grindeland, director of sales for i-mate plc, a Dubai company whose $299 Momento 10-inch frame goes on sale when Vista launches.

FREEING THE MUSIC
Another gadget, the Sonos Digital Music System, was wowing gearheads long before Vista came along. The Sonos system lets customers shoot music wirelessly from PCs to speakers throughout the house. And it worked well, except for music purchased online that contains copy protection preventing it from playing on multiple devices. Windows Media 11, the music technology inside Vista, fixes that, letting you stream copy-protected content throughout the house.

None of this was easy for Microsoft, which has always done better with business than consumers. “We’re really focused on creating a consumer brand for Microsoft,” says Brad Brooks, general manager in the Windows Client group. Microsoft’s critics will point out that many Vista features are already in Apple’s Mac OS X. Even Vista’s new method of recovering old versions of files, with the drab moniker Volume Shadow Copy, trails Apple’s much flashier Time Machine technology.

But for most PC users, these improvements will matter regardless of who had them first, says Michael Gartenberg, research director at JupiterKagan Inc. After all, Vista, like its predecessor, will continue to outsell the Mac by 20 to 1.

Businessweek

Mobile Web – A Completely New Ball Game

Rich Skrenta feels that it’s time for the Winner To Take All. Google has won in what he calls the Third Age of Computing.

IBM and Microsoft were in that position in the two prior Computing Ages, but now Google owns the Internet. David Beisel is not convinced and feels a Fourth Age of Computing is on the way where Google will need to get involved in a new ball game. That new ball game is the Mobile Web.

The Mobile Web has even greater economic potential than the traditional Web as visited by desktop PCs. .. and despite the best efforts of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) with its Mobile Web Initiative, it may not end up as they would wish as One Web. There is a fundamental disconnect between agreeing Standards and competing in a fast moving technology where there are mega-bucks at stake. If in addition, the Standards are tough to apply in order to achieve that One Web, then in practice it may not work out even if many would wish to apply the Standards.

The other factor is that many involved have lived through the Internet tidal wave and may see all this from their Desktop PC perspective. That One Web should just spread out so that it becomes the Ubiquitous Web. Doesn’t that seem a natural evolution to follow? Well natural evolution is fine provided we don’t run into a disruptive technology that changes all the ground rules. It may even be so cataclysmic that it deserves the title, transformational technology. Some observers would apply that description to the whole Mobile world.

That is at the heart of Mobile Persuasion @ Stanford University with its tagline, “Changing people’s beliefs & behaviors with mobile technology”. Cameron Moll summarizes another very important article by Tomi T Ahonen entitled, “Putting 2.7 billion in context: Mobile phone users“. That would certainly confirm that Mobile Phones represent a transformational technology. Ahonen’s final paragraph points out the urgency in all this.

Whatever your business or interest, going mobile now will give you a competitive advantage. But going mobile next year will be a desperation move to stay in the game. Don’t miss out on this. Mobile is the biggest opportunity going. Where is your business? Where is your mobile strategy?

The fact that Google may have been the winner in the Third Age of Computing is no guarantee of success in a completely changed world. There are already some powerful entities in the Mobile world. Google may already be Celling Out (free subscription required), but that doesn’t yet seem to be showing results. Even a Google-positive article, Hooked on Google (free subscription required) showing Google is leaving Microsoft in the dust, had a sting in the tail.

In brand new areas, like mobile devices that connect to the Internet, Microsoft is holding its own against Google. According to Telephia, a research firm, 3.7 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers are visiting Microsoft’s mobile Web sites, compared to 3.5 percent for Google.

But even in this area, Microsoft is still No. 2. Kanishka Agarwal, vice president of mobile content for Telephia, said Yahoo is No. 1 with 5.9 percent of subscribers due to the popularity of Yahoo mail.

It will be interesting to see what develops during 2007 in this fast-changing Mobile world.

End of service announcement

Free SkypeOut™ calls to US and Canadian phones ended December 31st.

After December 31st SkypeOut calls to US and Canada will be charged at the standard SkypeOut rate of ¢2.1 USD (or ¢2.4 CAD) per minute.

You can also get a full year of unlimited calls to any phone in the US and Canada. Get more information.

Skype Means Business – Saving Money is Just the Start

January 25, 2007 – Skype today announced it has taken Skype for Business one step further in response to continuous demand by businesses all over the world to use Skype™ to communicate with customers and colleagues. Skype for Business has proven to be incredibly popular because firms save both money and time as Skype is so easy to use and a convenient way of keeping in touch.

Business users have always been part of the Skype family and make up over 30% of Skype’s global community, now numbering at 171 million. In a recent survey of 250 businesses using Skype, 95% claimed to have saved money and 80% claimed that using Skype increased employee productivity.

One particular firm, Lewis & Hickey, a group of leading international architects that has recently installed Skype across its offices in the UK and Prague, claims that since making its first Skype call, it has saved up to 7.6 % on its standard call charges and wants to reach a cost reduction of 50% of its total telephony expenditure in the near future.

Benoit Mareschal, Director, Business Development at Lewis & Hickey, comments: “We have clients and teams across the UK and abroad and like many creative businesses we need to share ideas and keep in touch with one another. This can come at a high cost. We wanted to find a way to communicate but pay less for the privilege. Since we started using Skype, the amount we’re spending on international mobile and landline phone calls has dropped significantly. Skype creates a human bridge between technology and personable communication.”

The survey also revealed that 62% of the businesses communicate better with customers on Skype and 76% said they work more closely with colleagues because Skype is so easy to use.

Benoit Mareschal agrees, “Now we have Skype, the ability to talk with one another has increased enormously. People used to rely on email but with Skype you can get an immediate response to a query without disturbing the whole office – especially if you are using the instant chat feature. You can see when people are online, ask your question and carry on with what you were doing.”

With additional new features unveiled today, Skype has also made it easier for businesses to install and manage Skype. Skype can be easily installed on multiple computers using the Windows Installer package (commonly known as MSI), giving IT Administrators greater control over how Skype communications traffic runs across their corporate networks.

An online control panel enables companies to allocate individual users with Skype credits that can be used to make cheap SkypeOut™ calls to traditional landline phones or mobiles and provides a consolidated view of what is being spent.

Meanwhile, Skype is working collaboratively too. Together with its partners it has been working on a range of new business productivity tools, called Extras: these include the Convenos web conference and collaboration service, a package called Unyte which enables users to share the view off their PC desktop and a Skype-enabled call-centre offering from ACD.

Skype

eBay to end controversial practice of "extending" auctions?

Some very observant sellers noticed this subtle change to the eBay “fee circumvention” policy section that seems to spell the end of Extenders (more on this later)->

Extension of Auctions - eBay listings (‘auctions’) have a fixed duration. eBay may on rare occasions (for example, as the result of a site outage) extend the duration of an auction. Extension of auction duration by a seller, via either manual actions or the use of automated tools, is not permitted. Extension of auctions by a seller for any reason is not only a form of fee avoidance, but also harms the finding experience for buyers.

Here’s a quick background and tutorial on Extenders if this topic is new to you. A now-defunct company, Ethical worked with a large seller to productize an idea he had found to be a winning strategy for improving sell-through rates.

eBay has a way you can manually “extend” an auction if it hasn’t had bids and it is less than 12hrs from close, so what Ethical did was automate this. The way it works is you set your auctions (could be fixed price or BIN too) for 1 day. Then at close to 12hrs to the listing’s original duration ending (11hrs into a 24hr listing), the software checks the listing and if there are no bids asks eBay to change the duration to 3 days. Then again, this process happens all the way to 7 or 10 days (if the seller is willing to pay the additional 10 day fee).

Why does this help sell-through? Well, the eBay indexing system doesn’t really prioritize revised items (its busy handling the millions of fresh new listings every day – correctly so) and thus when you employ the strategy of extension listed above, your item shows up in eBay’s search engine (which remember is listed by default as ‘ending first”) up to 5 times (1/3/5/7/10).

Once Ethical went under, a plethora of these tools hit the market at near-free prices. Nobody but eBay knows how widespread the practice is, but if you were to survey 100 top sellers in each category, I think you would find 15-30 of them utilizing Extenders.

If you want to know what an extended listing looks like, there’s typically the word “revised” in parens next to the description as a link. When you click it, you can see that one of the revisions is “listing duration”. Here’s an example.

eBay’s documentation lists extenders now under fee circumvention (I’m guessing the argument is that you receive the same exposure from one listing that others pay for with 4-5) and search manipulation.

This is just starting to ripple through the community and as you would predict, sellers that utilize extenders are a) confused (no official announcement, so is this coming soon or for real now? b) upset that the benefit of Extenders is going away.

Conversely sellers that haven’t known about the Extenders are intrigued by the concept and sometimes upset they weren’t in the loop.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the coming weeks.

eBay Strategies

Notes from the eBay Top Seller Summit

From Kevin “Sleep is for the Uninspired” Harmon

InflatableMadness.com

Hi guys,

I just returned from the Top Seller Summit in San Francisco. This is eBay’s second annual e-comm conference – they invite the top 200 or so sellers on eBay for a 2 day conference.

It’s a good event to attend because most of eBays top brass are there and mingling about, so I was able to have many quality conversations with the people at eBay who influence decision and direction.

Here’s my main takeaways from the conference:

1. eBay has realized that there are some forces working against them now. They are beginning to acknowledge the level of fraud and to seriously study the growing attrition of buyers. The question is: Can eBay right the ship in time?

2. eBay will be working hard on improving the buying experience – they are rolling out a more detailed feedback 2.0 and working on improvements to the user interface.

3. eBay wants to make eBay fun again. ebay matchups is a good example of this.

I have always said that no matter how I feel about what eBay does as a company, I have never met an eBay employee who I didn’t like – to a person they are smart and friendly. The conference was a nice jug of eBay coolade that is appreciated by us sellers.

Now, if the free eBay bag I received just didn’t cost $500,000, we’d be in business.

Ha!

Kevin

StartupNation

eBay is introducing Feedback 2.0

This Wednesday at the EBAY ecommerce forum, Bill Cobb announced Feedback 2.0. Feedback 2.0, which we’ll be launching in pilot markets next month, allows buyers to rate transactions on item description, communication, shipping time, and shipping & handling charges. The average of each of the Detailed Seller Ratings is displayed on the seller’s Feedback Profile page. Perhaps it is just me, but this sounds little cumbersome.

In addition, old feedback will be archived. Later this year, EBAY will be archiving all but the last 24 months of feedback history. User’s total score will remain, but the percent will be based on just the last 2 years of activity. All comments older than this will be archived. This, on the other hand, is a welcome change.

Only eBay

Cell phone didn’t ignite California man

Fire investigators in California now say a cell phone did not cause a fire that severely burned a man last weekend.

The Vallejo Fire Department said on Thursday that it has ruled out a malfunctioning cell phone as the cause of a fire that on Saturday night caused second- and third-degree burns on more than 50 percent of Luis Picaso’s body.

Earlier this week, fire officials believed that the Nokia 2125i cellular phone found in the right pocket of Picaso, 59, was the cause of the fire. But when engineers from Nokia flew to Vallejo and tested the phone, they discovered that the electronic circuitry in the phone was undamaged and that the battery was still functioning.

William Tweedy, an investigator and public information officer for the Vallejo Fire Department, was present when the phone was tested.

“When we reinstalled the battery, the phone still booted up,” Tweedy said. “If the battery had malfunctioned or the phone had short-circuited, it wouldn’t have worked anymore. And it did, so we could rule out the phone as an ignition source.”

Tweedy said the only other possible way the fire could have started was from some kind of smoking materials such as cigarettes, matches or a lighter. Even though none of these materials were found at the scene of the fire, Tweedy said the fire was so intense, it likely destroyed all evidence.

At the time of the fire, Picaso was wearing nylon and polyester clothing, which is highly flammable and likely would have caused the fire to spread quickly. Picaso had also been sitting in a plastic chair, which also would have intensified the blaze, Tweedy said.

Picaso remains in critical but stable condition at U.C. Davis Medical Center in Sacramento.

Cell phone batteries have been blamed for other fires in the past. In July 2004, a young woman in Ontario, Calif., suffered second-degree burns when her Kyocera cell phone burst into flames while in her back pocket. In December, NTT DoCoMo, one of Japan’s largest mobile operators, recalled cell phone batteries used in its third-generation handsets because they could generate excessive heat that could short-circuit the phone.

News.com

Skype Takes One Step Further With New Pricing Strategy

Disruptive pricing gives Skype users more value and choice.

January 18, 2007 – Skype, the global Internet communications company, today announced its new global pricing structure which offers a simple, convenient and cost-effective way for consumers worldwide to call landlines and mobiles over the Internet. The new pricing structure complements the foundation of Skype’s success in letting anyone in the world talk for free, from one Skype software account to another.

The pricing structure is the latest in a series of new steps Skype is taking to give consumers a choice of easy-to-understand, value-based Internet communications packages. Initially focused on Europe, Skype’s new pricing strategy will roll out worldwide during 2007.

When launched in full, the pricing strategy consists of a premium subscription package (Skype Pro), one feature of which removes per-minute charges for SkypeOut calls to domestic landlines and includes a small connection fee.

“People like using Skype to make free calls from one Skype account to another but more and more they are choosing our paid for products that offer excellent value. As a result of this, we’re introducing a new pricing strategy today that will include a premium package. This premium package builds on the success we’ve had in North America and the UK with subscription-based calling promotions. It offers our users more for less because they can buy additional Skype paid for products but for a smaller cost,” said Stefan Öberg, General Manager, Skype Telecoms.

As a part of Skype’s premium package the global dialing rate to a number of countries is also reduced. The first phase of the SkypeOut pricing structure, effective from 13.00 CET on Thursday January 18th 2007, includes a reduction in global dialing rates to 0.017 € per minute for: Czech Republic (including Prague), Guam, Hungary (including Budapest), Israel (including Jerusalem), Luxembourg, Malaysia (including Kuala Lumpur), Puerto Rico and both Alaska and Hawaii in the United States.

For some countries, this represents a reduction of up to 65 per cent.

Skype also confirmed today that its previously announced connection fee rates, applicable worldwide, are now effective. The connection fee is a straightforward set-up charge per call. The Skype Unlimited Calling plan in the U.S. and Canada and the Talk for Britain campaign in the UK do not include a connection fee for national calls.

The connection fee is 0.039 Euro, excl VAT or the equivalent in local currency.

Today Skype users around the world can make free voice and video calls to any other registered Skype users as well as send instant messages, transfer files and participate in Skypecasts which are live moderated conversations with up to 100 people.

Skype users can also take advantage of Skype’s premium calling features, including SkypeOut™ (calls from Skype to traditional landlines or mobiles), SkypeIn™ (a number which can be called from a normal phone anywhere in the world) and Skype Voicemail (takes calls when users are busy or offline).

As the world’s largest Internet communications community, Skype is committed to giving its users the ability to set their conversations free at home, at work and on the move. It is focused on further developing its ecosystem of more than 50 hardware partners and more than 150 Skype-certified devices to broaden the appeal of Skype to a wider base of users who want to use Skype away from the PC, no matter where they happen to be. This is especially true for Skype users who want to take advantage of the mobile Skype experience, which is already accessible to more than 5 million Skype users on over 120 different Windows Mobile Smartphones and pocket PC devices.

For more information, please go to http://www.skype.com/products/skypepro/

Connection Fee Rates Rates Based on Currency* (excl. VAT)

• Australian Dollar (AUD) 0.059
• Brazilian Real (BRL) 0.09
• British Pound (GBP) 0.029
• Canadian Dollar (CAD) 0.059
• Danish Krone (DKK) 0.29
• Euro (EUR) 0.039
• Hong Kong Dollar (HKD) 0.39
• Japanese Yen (JPY) 4.9
• Norwegian Krone (NOK) 0.29
• Polish Zloty (PLN) 0.149
• Korean Won (KRW) 49
• Swedish Krona (SEK) 0.39
• Swiss Franc (CHF) 0.059
• Taiwan Dollar (TWD) 1.6
• US Dollar (USD) 0.039

*If your currency is not listed, the Euro rate is applicable

About Skype Skype is the world’s fastest-growing Internet communication offering, allowing unlimited free voice, video and instant messaging communication between users of Skype Software. With over 136 million registered users, Skype is available in 28 languages and is used in almost every country around the world. Skype generates revenue through its premium offerings such as making and receiving calls to and from landline and mobile phones, voicemail, call forwarding and personalization including ringtones and avatars. Skype also has relationships with a growing network of hardware and software providers. Visit Skype at www.skype.com.

Skype is an eBay company (NASDAQ: EBAY). To learn more visit skype.com.

Access to a broadband Internet connection is required for Skype and all Skype Certified devices and accessories. Skype is not a replacement for your traditional telephone service and cannot be used for emergency calling.

Skype, SkypeIn, SkypeOut, Skype Me, Skype Certified, Skypecasts, associated logos and the “S” symbol are trademarks of Skype Limited.

Skype