The best marketing pushes are the kind that link together a wide variety of different people and different processes. You rarely have a single person handling every aspect of the marketing. One team designs while another one sets up the details for when you need to get your printing done. For some types of advertising you might need other steps, like setting up a mailing list for direct mailing or good locations for when you print posters.



Before these projects start you need to ask yourself exactly how much time and money everything is going to take. Estimating too much is rarely if ever going to be an issue. Worst cast scenario you get your marketing done too far in advance and you just sit on it for a little while before releasing it.

But underestimating can lead to a whole slew of problems, including financial ones.

To get more specific, let's say you are going to print posters for your marketing push. Focusing purely on the printing side of things, let's say that you end up underestimating how many prints you're going to need. You have your locations already picked out but you suddenly find a few other prime places right after the printing was already done, but because you didn't print more than you thought you would need, you now don't have enough.

The first option is to just avoid the additional printing and fail to capitalize on these new locations. You lose potential business from it, which might cost you quite a bit in the long run.

The second option is that you go back to the company you got your stuff printed from and do another batch. The issue with this is the cost of having another printing order done. For most printing the primary part of the cost will come from actually setting up the process for printing, and less from the number you have printed.

This means you're having to cover that start up cost more than once, which will end up being considerably more than if you had just printed off a few additional copies from your first printing run.

So your only two choices are losing money from not having those customers, or losing money from having to do multiple print orders.

All of this can easily be avoided if you make sure to always assume you're going to need more than you first thought. Whatever number you end up with for printing, just tack on a few more just to be safe. This applies to everything about your project. Find you numbers, and then overestimate them by just a little.