How to Create a Marketing Strategy, Part 3
Before you begin, read How to Create a Marketing Strategy, Part 1 and How to Create a Marketing Strategy, Part 2.
Congratulations! You’ve evaluated your marketing efforts, researched your target market and found out who follows you and what kind of content they’re looking for, and now you’re ready for the final step: actually creating a marketing strategy for your small business!
I hope by now it has become obvious what platforms work best for you, where your time has been well spent (and where you might need to shift away some time), and what kind of content you can create that speaks to your audience. Now let’s talk about creating an actual marketing strategy for the entire year ahead! Grab a year-long planner or calendar (I use this one and love it - plus it has an instant download!) and let’s get to work.
First, mark down any big dates for your business this year. Do you usually have a Black Friday promotion? Is July your biggest sales month? Do you have any new product or service announcements coming up? You may not know everything right now, but write down what you do know and begin to plan around it. Record the dates you are expecting will be key for your business, and what the big announcement will be.
Next, plan 3 months ahead for each big date. While you don’t want to slam your audience with promotions for three months before every announcement, you can be strategic about it! For instance, if you know a Black Friday sale is coming up, you can plan to survey your audience a few weeks before and ask what kind of promotion they want: free shipping? A discount? Something else? This will create buzz, excitement, and buy-in for what’s coming without sounding too salesy.
If, for example, you usually book a lot of clients in July, create content ahead of time so that when you’re slammed with work, the rest of your business will run smoothly. Write blog posts a month in advance, schedule your social media, and take care of anything you can ahead of time. No matter what planning you have to do, it will help!
Third, in-between the ‘big dates’ on your calendar, write down a rough plan for what you’ll talk about in your marketing efforts, especially online. Maybe you want to create a serious about a particular topic. Maybe you have some advice you can share throughout the year that will be helpful to your audience. Perhaps you want to create more big dates by advertising, offering special promotions throughout the year, or boosting your newsletter list. Write it down! As you’ve heard many times before, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Plan for the year ahead as much as you are able, update as needed throughout the year, and you’ll have a clear strategy moving forward.
Finally, start working ahead now. Trying to come up with content the day before your ‘due date’ is never a good idea. Right now, block aside 2 hours in the next week to batch some of your bigger tasks like recording videos, writing blogs, creating newsletters, and whatever else you need to do in order to show up for your customers each and every day. In two hours you can get so much accomplished, and you won’t be scrambling at the last minute to try and figure out exactly what you want to do. At the end of your 2-hour session, plan the next session and make it an appointment on your calendar that you can firmly commit to.
There you have it! You now have a marketing strategy that you can use for the year ahead and adjust as needed. Maximize your time and effort, and your business will grow immensely as a result. Here’s to an even bigger year of business than ever before!
Read more: How to Create a Marketing Strategy, Part 3
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