As its convention and trade show season I’m sure that you’ll be overwhelmed with ideas and inspiration for marketing campaigns. The biggest problem is that you might have come across a golden nugget that at this point in time isn’t quite the right fit for your business. The last thing you’ll want to do is to leave those ideas in a notebook which you’ll slide into a draw and ever read again.
One of the seminars I attended over the last week at The Societies Convention here in London was hosted by the hardest working photographer in the portrait business; Sandy Puc. Sandy shared her ‘salsa box’ concept which is basically three sets of colour coded folders filled with notes and ideas.
You have a folder for ideas you need to get onto right now, another for some time in the near future and another for the not too distant but not near future…..or something like that but you get the idea.
As part of my own business plan for 2012 I have started my own marketing planner. Being a bit of a geek and always one for dipping in and out of ideas I needed something that was cloud based and I could get to at any point. Evernote has proved to be the perfect tool as not only I can access and edit it from my office computer but I can also work on ideas from my iPad and phone. Using an online resource means I can also reference suppliers, products, blog articles, pinterest boards and even online storage where I might keep artwork.
In Evernote I have created 5 different notebooks
- Current marketing campaigns – includes timelines and links to artwork and resources. I also have reports on the campaigns effectiveness
- Future campaigns for 2012 – these are campaigns which need development but I indent to put into place this year
- Future campaigns for the next 3 years – rough ideas that I hope to develop and use in the next three years
- Long term ideas – these ideas might be ones which I would like to implement as my business develops
- Past campaigns – ideas that I no longer use for whatever reason. There are full statistics on these campaigns stored here.
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Michael has been working as a photographer for the last ten years. In that time he has shot over 100,000 peoples’ portraits and worked in four different continents. In 2001 Michael graduated with a degree in photography from Manchester Metropolitan University.