For the past few October’s my husband and I canned applesauce. As we were putting the jars into the boiling water – the final step, it got me to thinking how the process we just went through applied to marketing.

How It Applies to Marketing

1. Timing is key. Apples are at their farm market peak in late September to early October. In marketing, you need to know when the best time to market your produce or service is. If you have a seasonal product, you can market in the off-season, but usually at a discount. Your buyers may not be looking for your products in the off-season, so it makes your marketing job harder.
2. Choosing the apples. We chose our apples from the farm market. We do this because we believe the product was fresh and ready for canning. In marketing, making sure the product or service you are working with is ready for market helps increase a positive experience for customers.
3. Instructions and tools. We had to get our instructions and tools in place, organized, and cleaned before beginning. By putting our tools out first, we knew what we needed and how we could best set up our workstation to be efficient and effective. Just like in marketing. By creating repeatable processes and using tools to be efficient, you can complete the process even if you haven’t done it for a year.
4. Shelf life. When you can anything, the final step is to wait for the little “pop” noise the lid makes when the top is sealed. This ensures the product will have a long shelf life. When it comes to marketing, there is a waiting game sometimes. You have to wait until the market is ready for your product or service. You may have to wait for sales to take off or for something to go viral.
5. Consumption. We are eager to try our new product, so we often save one jar for dinner the weekend we make it. For your customers, product or service consumption may be quick or happen over a period of months; it takes us about a year to eat all the applesauce we make. Sometimes we forget we made it until one of us puts a jar in the fridge. Ensure your marketing campaign keeps bringing your customers back to buy or consume your offerings.

Keep these five steps in mind the next time you need to create a marketing campaign.