When I was in high school, we had a bell that rang to signal the beginning and end of each class period. When one class session ended, the bell would ring. All the students gathered their books and made their way to the next class, which we were expected to do before the bell signaling the beginning of the next period rang. In between the two, we had a warning bell. It meant that you had two more minutes to get to class, so if you were still walking the hallways, hurry up!

In business, there is a warning bell and it is called Labor Day. It signals that summer, with all of its time off for vacations, is over. There is no more time for excuses not to get something done because everyone is out of the office. Labor Day also signals that 2/3rds of the year is over and only 1/3^rd is left to meet your yearly goals. It is time to get serious about completing the things that will move your business forward without any more procrastination. Labor Day typically signals the beginning of budgeting time for many businesses. It is time to measure what has worked and what has not, to put this into a spreadsheet and make plans for next year. Marketing touches all of these areas.

Finishing this year strong means making marketing work now. In most B2B sales situations, you only have 80 days from Labor Day to Thanksgiving. Many customers will put off any business purchases from Thanksgiving until mid-January. That is why making marketing inroads during the next couple of months is so crucial. If you are planning to give some sort of discount or incentive to your customer to buy now, make sure you are promoting that through your marketing efforts very soon. Early fall is a great time to reach out and touch your customers. For instance, if you are planning some sort of fall event or will be with customers at a trade show, give them a good reason to buy from you now. Use marketing to generate leads. Follow up on the leads quickly. The warning bell is ringing, so speed up your process.

Right after Labor Day, budgets for the next year are being formulated and submitted. Marketing plays a significant role in the budgeting process. With a little analysis of your marketing efforts compared to your sales, you should be able to interpret where your best marketing dollars were spent in the current year. What did it cost you to land a customer with each form of marketing? Were there promotions geared towards current customers? What did it cost you to upsell them? This type of analysis will give you two valuable tools to use in formulating a new budget: a thread connecting marketing activity to sales, and the knowledge of the types of marketing to which your customers best respond. Knowing what works and what does not, what is the least expensive way to get the same marketing impact, tracking engagement with your target market, charting how certain subsets of your market react to marketing during different months or seasons – all of this will help you make good planning decisions on where and when you should be spending your marketing dollars in the new year. Too often budgets, particularly marketing budgets, are just copied and pasted from the previous year without any thought to the success or failure of marketing. In that way, marketing becomes a guessing game. There is too much on the line to guess at what will work. Marketing is crucial to gaining new business and essential to keeping your current customers.

Don’t let the Labor Day bell go unanswered! Now is the time to pull your marketing together for the rest of the year and for your continued success in the new year.