No one likes being the last kid on the play­ground. Back to school is a vicious­ly com­pet­i­tive time of year, sec­ond only to the hol­i­days in rev­enue to be gained, accord­ing to Dou­bleClick by Google, and hav­ing your tim­ing down is half the bat­tle. Miss your mark, and you could find your­self miss­ing one of the biggest oppor­tu­ni­ties of the year.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, there’s no such thing as a “one-size-fits-all” approach to online mar­ket­ing when it comes to pre­cise cal­en­dar dates for sea­sons like these. Dif­fer­ent cus­tomers shop at dif­fer­ent times. Your job as an ecom­merce retail­er will be to fig­ure out which cus­tomers you want to reach, the best ways to reach them, and what time to launch your mar­ket­ing efforts.

Geog­ra­phy fig­ures into the equa­tion here, too; schools will reopen at dif­fer­ent times accord­ing to where in the coun­try they’re locat­ed (some open in ear­ly Sep­tem­ber; some will open in ear­ly August; and plen­ty will open any­where out­side or in-between), and that will have a big impact on your plans. Here are four rea­sons why tim­ing is so impor­tant in suc­ceed­ing at back to school.

1. Promotions Need To Start At Least A Month Early

Back-to-school shop­pers start their school sup­ply restock­ing at all dif­fer­ent times of year. As the above eMar­keter arti­cle demon­strates, some shop­pers will start as ear­ly as two months out and as late as two weeks before­hand.

To hit that sweet spot in the mid­dle where almost half of all shop­pers will start their search­ing, you need to begin your pro­mo­tions at least a month in advance. This is due to sev­er­al rea­sons, includ­ing all the dif­fer­ent types of paid search ads that can be run and which ones will be most effec­tive for which shop­pers.

Spe­cif­ic tar­get­ing and remar­ket­ing ini­tia­tives will be depen­dent on how ear­ly you got your first pro­mo­tions out, and remar­ket­ing can be a pow­er­ful tool to ensnare cus­tomers who have already looked at your prod­ucts. So be pre­pared, and have those pro­mo­tions ready to go for ear­ly launch so you can reach as many cus­tomers as pos­si­ble as soon as pos­si­ble.

2. Search Engine Optimization Will Take Time

SEO can be a tricky beast to mas­ter large­ly because it is real­ly two dif­fer­ent types of endeav­ors that fall under the same umbrel­la. Each effort will require time and ded­i­ca­tion, and some­times its own team of peo­ple, in order to be done well.

First comes all the on-site ele­ments, which can include fix­ing things like title and meta tags, or opti­miz­ing the site’s speed and source code. A prop­er­ly opti­mized site will rank more high­ly in the search engines, lead­ing to more vis­i­bil­i­ty for your prod­ucts. The bet­ter your vis­i­bil­i­ty, the high­er your con­ver­sions will be. The savvi­est sites will make back to school the pri­ma­ry focus of their web­sites dur­ing this piv­otal time.

Sec­ond comes all the off-site ini­tia­tives, cre­ative efforts like info­graph­ics. The best kind of cre­ative con­tent is the kind that isn’t a sales pitch, and you can’t force a graph­ic to become viral. What is required is mak­ing the best and most engag­ing con­tent pos­si­ble and ensur­ing it reach­es the widest audi­ence you can encour­age it to reach.

Rank­ing well in search engines and gain­ing trac­tion through cre­ative both take time and sim­ply can’t be forced. There’s no “fast track” to ensur­ing instan­ta­neous pos­i­tive change or recog­ni­tion.

For this rea­son, you might want to have your SEO ele­ments in place or already begun as much as two months in advance to ensure best results. Bar­ring this best-case sce­nario, leave your­self at least a month.

3. Gaining Social Media Traction Requires Repeated Efforts

As with off-site SEO, there is no mag­ic bul­let to ensur­ing that any one of your social media posts will be the gold­en tick­et to wild suc­cess and viral pop­u­lar­i­ty. You may luck out by com­ing up with that one pithy line of text that gets your Face­book post shared across hun­dreds of News Feeds, but with an oppor­tu­ni­ty as big as back to school wait­ing to be tapped, you can’t rely on luck alone.

A depend­able social media pres­ence takes time and good­will to build, and to get good­will, you need qual­i­ty con­tent.

One sol­id back-to-school tac­tic could be run­ning a con­test, through which entrants are col­lect­ed by hash­tag­ging their posts on Twit­ter. But even this takes time: the announce­ment of the con­test, the time the con­test is allowed to run, and the announce­ment of the win­ner (plus, ide­al­ly, that win­ner ded­i­cat­ing more posts or Tweets to their vic­to­ry) could take upwards of three weeks if you’re on a fair­ly rapid sched­ule.

And this is just in an ide­al sce­nario. Real­ly good social media will take more time to build, with repeat­ed posts across the mul­ti­ple social media accounts you’re hope­ful­ly main­tain­ing.

Qual­i­ty con­tent post­ed semi-fre­quent­ly over time is the only reli­able method for get­ting your audi­ence to both notice and remain engaged with your brand social­ly.

One of the most pow­er­ful fea­tures of social is its abil­i­ty to retar­get and to per­son­al­ize: accord­ing to Inc.com, 40 per­cent of stu­dents and 45 per­cent of par­ents said “per­son­al­iza­tion in adver­tis­ing,” which is pos­si­ble through the inti­ma­cy and imme­di­a­cy of social media, got their atten­tion.

4. Mobile Is King & Needs To Be Ready As Early As Possible

One of the sin­gle most impor­tant things a busi­ness can have is a ful­ly opti­mized mobile web­site. A mobile site is impor­tant for every point men­tioned above and more.

Accord­ing to pro­pri­etary Google research, mobile impact­ed more con­sumers per dol­lar spend than both broad­cast and cable TV dur­ing the back-to-school sea­son of 2014, and 56 per­cent of back-to-school con­sumers will use a smart­phone when shop­ping.

Even more impor­tant­ly, Googled rolled out a “mobile-friend­ly update” in April of this year, which was designed to “boost the rank­ing of mobile-friend­ly pages on mobile search results” accord­ing to the offi­cial Google Web­mas­ter Cen­tral Blog.

Think that means your busi­ness needs a mobile web­site? Absolute­ly.

With more than half of shop­pers search­ing for their back-to-school prod­ucts on their mobile devices, if your page isn’t mobile-friend­ly, you’ll suf­fer a hit to your rank­ings and stand to lose shop­pers who don’t want to put up with a frus­trat­ing­ly dif­fi­cult-to-use web­site that isn’t trans­lat­ing onto their smart­phone.

If your site isn’t already mobile opti­mized, that needs to be your top pri­or­i­ty even before points one through three of this arti­cle. Even if you only make it mobile respon­sive ver­sus mobile opti­mized, that would be an impor­tant step up that would allow you to get your oth­er back-to-school mar­ket­ing efforts off the ground. As with every oth­er step, devel­op­ing a mobile web­site will take time, so jump on that imme­di­ate­ly if you haven’t already!

Conclusion

If you’re sud­den­ly feel­ing rushed about get­ting your back-to-school mar­ket­ing in gear, good; that’s how you should be feel­ing. But don’t fret.

There’s still enough time to make sure you set up all the nec­es­sary pieces to a sol­id back-to-school cam­paign. Just use that ener­gy to good pur­pose and get start­ed as soon as pos­si­ble!

With the right mar­ket­ing strate­gies and enough advance time and plan­ning, you’ll make this back-to-school sea­son rock.

What has worked well for you in your back-to-school mar­ket­ing cam­paigns?