Timing is Everything: Why You Should Think Twice Before Buying a Christmas Tree on Sale

As a kid, my Uncle Bill was nicknamed “the book” by my dad and his siblings because he was a fountain of knowledge. He was smart enough to get a free ride at M.I.T. and was successful enough in his career to retire early. While he’s definitely book smart, his street smarts are debatable. 

One winter when he was in elementary school, Uncle Bill dragged an enormous Douglass Fir Christmas tree home and proudly recounted how he shrewdly negotiated a great deal for the tree. The problem? It was December 27 and to pay for a Christmas tree after the holidays is kind of silly (to put it mildly).

  

Best Times to Reach Your Customers?

In the rapid-fire, real-time era of the digital age, there’s lots of debate about the best times to reach your target audiences – and how this can vary significantly by digital channel. Here are some of the theories out there:

• Blog:  Timing is all over the map and depends on who you are trying to reach (B2B vs. B2C). KISSmetrics and others have treasure troves of data to analyze (link)
• Facebook:  Mondays between 1:00-3:00 p.m. ET according to bit.ly (link)
• Twitter:  2:00-5:00 p.m. is the best window to get retweeted says HubSpot (link)
• Email (B2B):  Tuesdays between 8:00 a.m.-noon, based on a report from Pardot that MarketingProfs published (link) 

Alternatives to Following the Herd
On the face of it, a lot of these recommendations seem pretty straightforward. But you can also miss some fantastic opportunities if you spend most of your efforts trying to reach your core audiences during these peak times. Successful search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns, for example, look beyond the most popular keywords to also cast a wider net of alternative terms.

So, if you are a consulting firm that helps companies improve their sales operations, you might not be able to unseat global firms like Bain for the top search engine rankings for popular search terms like “sales force effectiveness.” This keyword phrase has a high search query volume and is highly competitive. Global firms have the content, site traffic and other requirements to garner the top search results for this phrase. But you can try to rank for terms that aren’t as popular – such as “sales operations” and “sales operations strategy” – to reach people who are searching for alternate, less popular terms.

What lessons can we draw from this? Like rush hour traffic, social media channels also become highly congested during peak times, and this increased competition could cause your content to be overshadowed.

So think beyond benchmark best practices and better understand when your key targets are the most responsive. Tools from Sprout Social and other companies can help you analyze your social media activity to better identify when your audiences are typically the most engaged. Flexibility and experimentation regarding the timing of your content are keys to improving digital engagement and outmaneuvering your competitors.

Who knows, maybe you’ll score the equivalent of selling a Christmas tree after the holidays. After all, timing is everything.

(Image courtesy of Dream Designs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net)