As a business owner, it's easy to get stuck in the weeds of our business. I often find myself looking back at a crazy week and realizing I hadn’t done anything to advance my own business. Marketing your business is one of those things that can be tossed to the side when things get busy, but it’s the biggest way we create growth in our business.
When I get caught in the midst of everything I need to do as a mom and entrepreneur, I always forget I need to market my business. Even worse, when I do finally realize I need to make that social media post or write a blog, I’m so exhausted that my brain can’t even remotely figure out what I should talk about.
Now, I’m implementing a practice I created while working in corporate America. Usually, I’d spend the last two weeks of the year (the slowest weeks for the company I worked at) going through this practice to create a marketing strategy for the year. The difference between this and a typical “marketing plan” is that while I did go over KPI’s and statistics, this plan focuses on actionable strategies that will keep you going throughout the next year. This is the practice that kept me on-task while managing the marketing department, during the largest growth year in company history at the time.
Why Should You Do This?
If I’m being completely honest, it's not super revolutionary. I simply just planned our marketing for the year. But it’s something I’ve failed to do for my own business, and I know a lot of other business owners who don’t do this either.
It can be overwhelming to look at 12 months and plan for that far in advance. I also know the benefits of having your year planned out that far in advance. If done right, your marketing plan becomes the foundation of your entire year in business. If you have no idea what your next 3-6 months in business is going to look like, your marketing plan can help fill in those holes that you’re missing.
If your business is super seasonal and you know when you’re going to be really busy, your marketing plan can help ease the eb and flow of your business. You can sit down now and figure out how to get more orders during your slow season and maybe get pre-orders in to ease your busy season.
Need an Easy Way to Plan Your Marketing?
The Marketing Plan Workbook lays out all these steps in a simple to follow format.
Step 1: Review & Set Goals
The first step in this process is to review your year. I like to write down my final revenue for the year, gross and net, as well as all my marketing numbers. Here is everything I write down to review my year. You may have more stats/numbers, but this should get you started:
- Gross Revenue
- Net Revenue
- Email Statistics
- Social Media Stats (Followers, engagement, top posts, etc.)
- Website Visits & Stats (Top sources, avg time on site, bounce rate, etc.)
Once I’ve got an overview of where I’m at, I like to look at how my time was spent. You can look at your planner or calendar, or just look back at each month. I like to figure out when my slowest months were and when my busiest months were. Just get that written down for now, and we will look at ways to address that later.
Next, take these numbers and start setting goals for the new year! You can use the sheet provided in the workbook. I always try to set financial goals first and then use those goals to set the rest of my goals. This is because most of my other goals are part of how I reach a lot of my financial goals.
Here are the categories I am using this year:
- Financial (Monthly and yearly revenue goals)
- Authority (My authority online and within my industry)
- General Social Media
- Website Statistics
Just as a note, I do set other goals for my mindset, time and personal life also. So feel free to throw in other categories too!
Step 2: List All Offers
Now it’s time to begin actually planning your year! This is the part that everyone finds so overwhelming, which is why I break it down into a lot of smaller, easy-to-digest steps.
The first step is super simple, but probably the most important piece, because this is the step that we will base all of the other steps off of.
Start by breaking your offers up into categories. If you downloaded the printable, write your categories in the top area of each box. It doesn’t matter how many categories you have. I like to keep it between 3 to 6 categories, because that gives me enough time to really dig deep into my topics. Feel free to print extra pages as you need them.
Just as an example, my four categories are:
- Website Design
- Branding
- Digital Marketing
These are very broad categories for my business which is exactly what you want. You don’t want to get too specific until we get into the subtopics or actual offers. You can pretty much have as many subtopics under these categories as you like. Add these offers or subtopics on each line under the category it belongs to.
As you can see above, there’s not really any rhyme or reason to my lists. They don’t have the same number of services underneath. It’s just listing out the services for each of those categories.
Yours may not be based on service categories. Yours may be based on seasonal themes or steps within your customer journey. This is just what works best for my business and my offerings.
Step 4: Plan & Schedule Content
This is probably the longest step and really has about three steps inside of it. First, you'll plan your "seasons". I like to try to lay my content out based on seasons because it helps me create a more cohesive flow of content. This helps me keep from jumping around from topic to topic which helps me stay on track, and helps my audience keep up with what's going on.
Turn to the Marketing Seasons page and get your colored markers or pens out for this one. (If you have slow and busy months, now is the time to mark those and consider what you could do that would ease the stresses that come with each of those seasons.)
The categories you set in the "Your Offers" page will become your seasons. They can be split and repeated as you see fit, but just break the year up into those overall categories. Start by color coding each category and drawing a box in that color around the months of the season. Don't overthink it. NOTHING is set in stone. This is just a guide for the year. Things can always change. Also, just because a month belongs to one category, doesn’t mean you can’t promote other categories. This is just the category we are going to really focus on for these months.
Next, we dig deeper into the year by setting our monthly themes! Using your subtopics and offers from Your Offers page, plan a theme for each month. I usually only do one theme for each month because my services are fairly complex so I dig deeper into the topics when I plan the weeks.
Finally, you'll plan out your weekly themes on the Content Plan page. Choose a theme for each week, and really get as specific as possible. Then plan your outreach for that specific theme. What long form content pieces will you create? What social media posts?
Step 5: Ask for Help & Delegate
Next create a list of all the individual items you know you're not an expert in or simply don't want to do. There's no reason for those things to hold you back in your business! So find someone who can or will do what you can't or don't want to do. There's absolutely nothing wrong with asking for help! If you struggle with this, trust me, you're not alone!
Step 6: Review Every Season
Plan to review your strategy AT LEAST between every season. Things are going to change throughout the year. If we learned nothing from 2020, we should at least have learned that! I like to set a lunch date with myself and go over my business numbers every month. It gives me a chance to get out of the office and have a new change of scenery while eating my at my favorite lunch spot. If you can't do this every month, at least try to do this between each of your "seasons".
You're Done!!
Okay! Take a deep breath! That was a lot, but it’s totally worth it and it will make your entire year run more smoothly! Don’t forget to review your plan as you go through the year. Between seasons is the perfect time to reevaluate if nothing too crazy arises.
I love supporting other small business owners, so I encourage you to let me know about your business and the goals you’re setting for the new year!
Need an Easy Way to Plan Your Marketing?
The Marketing Plan Workbook lays out all these steps in a simple to follow format.