Timing of marketing campaigns can be crucial. Some of the most successful campaigns involve taking advantage of a relevant event. A great example is “getting mushy” for Valentine’s Day. Holidays can be the perfect opportunity to show your clients some love. Providing sales or alternative incentives to purchase your product/use your service are common fare.

If you want to be more creative, but not risky, there are a ton of major events to take advantage of. A good example right now would be the olympics, since they only occur every couple of years.

Not all of us can afford to advertise during international events or the Super Bowl, but feel free to use smaller scale events such as local beer festivals, food competitions, etc…

If you’re witty and really on top of things, you can perform a task known as “newsjacking”. “Newsjacking is the art and science of injecting your ideas into a breaking news story and generating tons of media coverage and social media engagement”. In what has become a defining example for PR enthusiasts around the world, Oreo took advantage of the power outage during the Super Bowl in 2013 by sharing a post to social media stating “you can still dunk in the dark”. They were able to tweet the image at no cost, and generated over 15,000 retweets. If you’re on top of timing, and creative enough, you can do the same for your business.