It’s always crucial to plan ahead and the same is true for promoting your business online. Close planning and scrutiny to detail is arguably more important online, because doing business on the web has the potential to scale much more quickly and dramatically than the typical offline operation.

Consider an upstart shoe retailer. She may own a single store with several hundred products. Aside from the occasional inventory issue, it’s easy for the owner to track product and manage in-store promotions; most of the product is very much in her field of vision. Online, even her one store can develop (quite quickly) into hundreds of product pages, each with potentially out of date promotional information, obsolete product detail, and negative customer reviews, all of which need to be strategically maintained and addressed. Essentially, if a customer is unhappy with a pair of shoes in the owner’s store, an associate is there to quickly address the issue. Online, the issue could linger unaddressed in the form of a customer comment on a product page. Even worse, if not properly maintained, old promotional information could be advertised on several items that the owner may have neglected to remove.

I’ve already discussed some strategies for handling customer reviews, which you can read here. In this post, I’ll discuss how a promotional/editorial calendar can help maintain the vast jungle that is your online business site.

The idea is to simply try to plan out as far ahead as feasible your promotions (coupons, shipping offers), product releases, and site’s general editorial direction (themed messages, the “feel” of the site, etc.) If you know in advance that you will be promoting a new product launch, you’ll be able to identify potential promotional hazards. For example, you can anticipate the new product promotion and decide to hold off on a shipping promotion until after the product launch. If you have a complete view of the year’s promotions, you can avoid double-dipping coupons or having two major promotions compete for your customers’ attention.

Calendars can help you track when promotional copy should go live and when it should be removed from the site. Ideally, your eCommerce software suite should help with this effort, but for many small businesses, a more manual approach is necessary. If you clearly define the scope of your promotional message, you can avoid leaving old information on your site. We all get busy or distracted with our daily responsibilities; a calendar and sound strategy can help alleviate the burden of balancing your online site’s needs with your other business imperatives.  

Calendars also have the benefit of being shareable. Consider using Microsoft Outlook if you have Exchange to share your strategic calendar with colleagues. Outlook has reminders, which further help you maintain the message and marketing on your website.

Doing business online requires as much, if not more, TLC than a traditional brick and mortar operation. Each has its unique challenges, but the expanding nature of online commerce can lead to important elements being neglected. By using an editorial/promotional calendar, you can be ready to meet these challenges and succeed.