While it is true that September is coming in shortly, it is never too late to create plans in regards to your business’ marketing campaign. People say that marketing is similar to planting a tree; there are practically two best times to do it. One of them is 20 years ago, or in our case when you started your business and the second one is now. Let us focus on now, considering the fact that we can’t do anything about what happened 20 years ago.
Given the nature of marketing, a solid plan of action will be needed to cover all of its intricacies and possible strategies. Making a marketing schedule or calendar is the perfect thing in this case as it not only allows you to remember what your monthly activities are, but it also doubles as a working document you can change whenever the need to do so arises.
The design of our schedule should not be anything more than an ordinary spreadsheet, with each column representing a different month and each row representing a marketing activity we need to perform. This means that if you for example want to release a blog article every month, you will put a mark in every month-column for this action.
You will also need to take some time to think up of possible activities to perform as a part of our annually marketing plan. Consider the pros and cons of each and every one of your ideas and whether you are able to perform them both financially and time-wise. This will in turn make it possible for you to clearly visualize your ideas and also:
- Make your priorities straight when it comes to your business’ marketing plan.
- It will point out where you have too much work packed into too little time. If you have a lot of activities planned for a certain period you might be left short on time to do more important work. While there are times when you want to intensify your exposure, for example right before a holyday season, it is generally a bad idea not to spread out your workload evenly.
- In contrast to previous point it also helps you spot where you have too little activity planned for a certain period. As stated above spreading your workload evenly will ensure that your business’ reputation remains high, while allowing you to tackle more important tasks as well.
- You can see what works for you and your company and what does not. You can grade your activities each year or quarter and make sure that you improve your plan constantly by reapplying the strategies that worked for you and discarding the ones that did not have the effect you wished for.
And this pretty much sums up all the wisdom of creating your own marketing schedule. Repeat what worked before and plan in quarters or months depending on what feels most comfortable for you. The important thing is that you maintain the focus on your marketing plan once it has been created and never forget to complete your scheduled activities. The more you keep it up, the better results you will witness.
