Continuous marketing…no excuses
Last week we posted the article, “Don’t Stop Marketing When You’re Busy,” which explains that, while being too busy to market is a common and seemingly sensible excuse, if you let your marketing efforts fall to the wayside, you’ll soon have plenty of free time to think about marketing because you’re likely to run out of work. In your business’s most desperate and fragile state, there will be no funds to put towards the marketing efforts needed to keep it alive.
Why plan a full year?
We understand that it’s easy to fall into this state of mind if you don’t have a plan in place, but that’s why it’s imperative to plan ahead. We strongly suggest developing marketing plans in yearly cycles. A detailed year long marketing plan gives you something to stick to when you’re feeling the pressures of busy times and helps you make the most of slower times.
A full year is good amount of time because it’s enough to produce a decent sample of results, but not so much time that it becomes overwhelming to sort through all your marketing efforts and data. After a few years, this practice will become routine and it will be easy to stick to once you see the positive results.
Build your plan
Begin the cycle during a slower period, if possible and give yourself a month or two to review the past year, make adjustments, implement new strategies and put together your new plan.
Start by filling your biggest, most important events of the year. Detail the steps that are needed to prepare and block out the required time on your marketing calendar. From there, your calendar will show you where an additional marketing push might be beneficial.
Don’t leave any chunks of time empty; there’s always something productive you can be doing, but the time can easily slip away if you don’t dedicate it to a specific effort in your marketing plan. Use the time to update your website, prepare blog posts, pre-schedule social media posts or create content for brochures or other marketing materials.
Put it to work
Share the plan with your entire company, so everyone can work together towards the same goal and suggest additions or improvements along the way.
Be prepared to make changes to your plan throughout the year. Unforeseen events are bound to happen over the course of a year, so give your plan some breathing room. Rather than scraping the whole plan when you hit a bump in the road, try making sensible adjustments that allow you to continue making marketing efforts through the remainder of the year.
If you would like help developing your first marketing plan or could use some fresh new strategies to update a plan that hasn’t been performing, that’s exactly what we’re here for! Contact Thrive4 today: 303-940-5544.