A colleague of mine is fond of saying “timing is everything.” Thus, when we are ready reach out and touch people who are prospective customers, some times are better than others.

Here’s some useful info on dates to plan around for both business-to-business and consumer campaigns from Prospects To Go:
Prospects To Go’s holiday calendar shows government holidays as well as religious and secular holidays that are recognized by enough people in the United States to be noteworthy to marketers. Our calendar has broken ground by also highlighting common vacation and travel days – periods that B-toB- marketers want to avoid and consumer marketers tend to hammer.
2010
There were a couple challenges to putting together next year’s calendar:
• There’s no consensus on dates for Spring Break, we discovered, when checking several school-district and university calendars. We still designated the time between March 29th, the night Passover starts at Sunset, and April 5th, the day after Easter, as a busy personal travel period.
• We wondered for the first time if there’s enough scar tissue on the collective memory of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that marketers can now freely deliver their messages on that day without offending anyone. We decided not. Also, since 2002, 9/11 has become a quasi-holiday called Patriot Day, with the American flag flown at half-staff at the White House, all federal buildings and many private homes.
History of the calendar
We developed this calendar in 2005 when we recognized that some clients of our list brokerage and media-buying agency were forced to advertise at poor times because they hadn’t anticipated holidays in advance. Some celebrations – like Martin Luther King Day in January and Veterans Day in November – are one-day events that you can easily work around. But we’ve seen B-to-B clients lose as much as a percentage point in response (compared to other campaigns we’ve done for them at other times) when they launched campaigns during the major vacation and travel periods around Thanksgiving and Independence Day.
Of course you need to customize this even further to meet your own business cycle. Event marketers working on city tours can refine this calendar by being sensitive to important ethnic holidays in cities with a preponderance of minorities who will be observing them.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 3:08 pm by John Mallen and is filed under News & Thinking, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.