As every smart business owner knows, marketing your business should be a CONSTANT effort. It's something you need to continuously doing in order to keep your pipeline full of interested and qualified prospects.
However, for many, life simply gets in the way, obstacles arise, and all the good intentions seem to fade. As a result, you come to your senses one day and realize your pipeline's dry as a bone and you're struggling just to survive.
Grow Calendar 2011
One way to make sure this doesn't happen is to create a detailed day-by-day calendar of marketing tasks and activities to be completed over the next 12 months.
Creating this calendar acts very much like the GPS turn-by-turn navigation system in your new car. You tell it where to go (writing out your goals) and as you move along the journey (going through the year) the system tells you where to turn (the marketing activities to complete) in order to arrive safely at your final destination.
In order to help you create a magical marketing calendar, here are 7 key steps to keep in mind:
1. Plan out the entire 12 months in advance.
By laying out the full 12 months ahead of time, you lay out the entire year's journey ahead of you. This is what gives you the turn-by-turn direction needed to achieve the goals you've laid out for your business.
2. Plan a 'campaign' every month.
As you plan the full 12 months, it's important to create an 'activity' or 'campaign' for each and every month of the year. This does a couple of things for you.
First, it gets you in the marketing mindset. Doing something each and every month forces you to think about marketing more consistently and it should encourage you to study and learn good marketing principles.
Second, it helps develop name recognition with your target market. While small businesses should NEVER waste money on branding type marketing, developing some name recognition as a side benefit of good direct response marketing is a good thing. Being consistent with your marketing helps make this happen.
3. Pick a theme for each campaign.
One of the biggest sins of marketing is being boring. With as much advertising as your prospects are subjected to, it's important to be interesting and picking a theme for each month's campaign helps generate interest.
To create an interesting theme use current events in the local or national media, holidays, movies, or anything else that you can create a character or story around.
4. Target your efforts at prospects, customers, and partners.
To create a pipeline that's always full, you need to tap as many resources as possible. It's impossible to rely on just one method to create a steady stream of interested, qualified prospects and by directing your activities at generating new business via prospects, your existing customers, and joint venture partners, your chance of filling your pipeline increase substantially.
5. Be flexible.
Now, even though your plan is for a full 12 months, there may be obstacles or detours in the road the cause you to adjust your course. Be flexible enough with your plan to accommodate these changes. Doing so will ensure you the ability to make the necessary adjustments that will allow you to reach your destination.
6. Schedule periodic checkups.
A big key to success with your plan is the ability to check your progress and make changes as needed. To make sure these periodic check ups occur, schedule appointments in order to make sure they happen.
7. Stick to your plan!
This is quite possible the BIGGEST key to success with your 12 month marketing calendar. After going through the time and effort required to create your calendar, it would be a shame to not put it to use.
So, as soon as you finish creating your step-by-step marketing roadmap, make the resolution to STICK TO IT! Don't allow life's ups and downs deter you from carrying out your plan.
If you know where you want to take your business in the next year, the only way to ensure your safe arrival at the final destination is to clearly map out your path. Creating this 12 month magical marketing calendar will give you the direction you need to achieve some phenomenal results.
12 Month Marketing Calendar - Your Turn-By-Turn Navigation System To Business Success Grow Calendar 2011
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