In life, timing can be very important. It can make the difference between winning and losing. Had Usain Bolt not gotten the perfect start, he wouldn’t have set the world record. It can make the different between life and death. Had Beyonce stepped out of her car a moment sooner, Jay Z would have lost a bride. Timing can make the difference between your message being seen or heard by your audience or it merely floating off into cyberspace unnoticed. But in order for your message to be delivered, the audience must be there to receive it. That is why it is so important in digital marketing for you to be aware of when your audience is present an engaging online.
Timing is important in all aspects of business. As a business owner, you have to react to your surroundings. In order to maintain optimal efficiency, you will have to increase and decrease your business as your environment changes. For example, the small Memphis, Tennessee biotech corporation GTx Inc has been steadily growing for the past year. One of their developmental compounds was on track with the FDA to finalize testing. Through that time, they brought on more and more people, so they would be ready to hit the ground running when the product was approved. Unfortunately, the results of the last round of testing came back negatively about a month ago. Today GTx announced that they will be laying off about sixty percent of their workforce, and the CEO is taking a twenty percent pay decrease. They probably don’t want to do these things, but they are responding to the ever-changing market around them.
On the other side of that coin, Amazon is handling a similar problem in a very different way. Because of the different nature of these businesses, Amazon has the advantage of knowing when their business will increase. GTx hired extra people when thinking positive test results would support a sustained increase of business. Amazon, being a retail business, experiences huge booms of business during the holiday months. Then the business subsides. So instead of hiring fulltime people and unrealistically hoping to be able to keep them later in the year, they are hiring a large amount of seasonal employees, which is a forty percent increase from last year. They are both anticipating a large increase of business while still understanding that it won’t last. This is the best possible method for Amazon because they get to continue to take full advantage of the seasonal increases without having to sustain it all year around.
Digital marketing is no different. If you don’t pay attention to your timing, you may not get the full results out of your efforts. And if you want your business to succeed, you need to be as efficient as possible. That means that if you are going to go through the trouble of trying to engage your audience, make sure they are listening and what you have to say is intelligent and timely.
You can’t afford to only focus on whether your information is intelligent. Unfortunately, even great ideas can seem like bad ones if presented at the wrong time. Here is an example from today. As you have probably seen them do many times before, from time to time Google dedicates their homepage to things of note. Today they chose to honor the fact that it is the 123rd Anniversary of Yosemite National Park. This is a well-deserved honor, but the congratulations are short lived because Yosemite was closed today as part of the federal government shutdown. So if you search online for news about Yosemite, all you see are articles about how it isn’t even open.
Now, this is not a big issue for Google, but it should serve as a lesson for the rest of us. When you are spreading your message, especially one that reflects your business, you should pay attention to when and how you disseminate it. You want to control the story, not let it control you. That is digital marketing 101.
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/shehan/4722862469/