Marketing Secret #44 Develop Your Promotional and Marketing Calendar

This stage of the process is crucial to your success.  This is how you begin to create your Money-Making Marketing Machine!

Most businesses don't have a clearly defined marketing plan based on a promotional calendar model. 

We know so many small businesses that had simply gone from one campaign to the next based on what marketer had been in touch or what article they had read or who they had been talking to that week. 

We’ve said it before but

HOPE IS NOT A STRATEGY!

You have to plan and budget. 

By immersing yourself in promotional concepts, sales events, marketing strategies, and all the other social media postings and campaigns, you will develop a full 12 or 18 month marketing calendar. 

As you work through the options, you will be able to map out what strategy you are going to test next, followed by a step two.  You will also know exactly when you are going to implement your new campaign based on previous history and experience. 

Start with an end game in mind

I know, you've heard this before but its true.  If you know what you want to achieve it actually becomes easy to plan.  Here are the steps I recommend you do: 

1) Put aside at least a full day initially to start to map this out.  

    Have a 12 to 18 month calendar at hand, to use.  Sit down with your key staff to go over what has             worked in the past and what strategies you want to start with from this programme. This can be a         great brainstorming opportunity where your staff can buy-in on the project.  

    Once you have at least five ideas that you can start with, then consider another five strategies you         can include later down the track.  Now this gives you a core list of strategies to start your marketing     plan. 

2) In the calendar include important dates.  
    This could be public holidays, school holidays, seasonal events and celebrations. 

    This is where you can actually have a lot of fun.  You will start thinking of the promotions and                   marketing campaigns, holidays and celebrations in a new and exciting way. 

3)  Now start to plan out your ideas in and around these dates.  
      For example if you are looking to hold any events for your                    business, you can now add these into the appropriate dates. 

4) Now the fun begins.  
     As you enter in your marketing outcomes/goals you want to                  achieve you can start working backwards with your strategies. 

The following is a true story.

I ran a new women's event in May 2019 for 120 attendees, first of its kind, with only a 2 month lead in time frame from concept to actuality.  After creating a Run Sheet for the day, we quickly created the Promotional and Marketing Calendar. 

We had the date of the event and 2 months to get sorted, branded, tickets purchased and attendees. 

Working backwards from D-Day, we mapped out our social media strategies - how many posts per week, their messaging and call to action. 

Furthermore, we included posts about our speakers, sponsors and partners. 

Included in the marketing calendar was our email communication strategy because we needed to ensure our database received the same consistent message.  

Likewise, we coordinated with our speaker, sponsors and partners to find out when they would be releasing information to their databases and actually provided this content for them. 

By the time the event started we had 120 attendees for a 1 day event and huge success.

More importantly, we scheduled posts during and after the event to keep the momentum.  

Which leads me to point 5) Plan your campaign to include post-event.  This is important especially for events. 

If you have planned for content to posted after the event, then you wil create exceptional content during the event.  This is an extension on your promotional and marketing calendar and the content can be repurposed in the future.

Don't be perfect ... just have fun and plan.

This point is important. Just map it out loosely until you have the full 12 or 18 months period covered. 

Your initial marketing plan is more of a marketing mudmap and is yet to be defined but it is your basis now for bringing in the aspects of finer detail to each campaign. 

Then you go back to the beginning and start to define exactly what program you're going to implement when.  

Having this overall view should bring in the dollar component for budgeting.  As some of this is totally new and foreign to you, it may be difficult to put an exact dollar but at least  by having a sense of the bigger picture you are able to spread out your initial budget.

Start now! You'll surprise yourself! 

Need to get started again and plan out your promotional and marketing calendar, if so then reach out to us at admin@yourmarketingmachines.com.au or book a 15 minute no-obligation call with one of our team.