If you’re a business owner, entrepreneur, or anyone who wants consistent business, you need to know how to create a marketing calendar. It’s just not optional!
Business should not be feast or famine. If you want consistent sales every single month, guess what? You need consistent marketing every single month! One of the biggest mistakes I see entrepreneurs make is that they are constantly throwing things together at the last minute to try to drum up some business. If that sounds like you, it’s time to make a change!
I don’t imagine anyone is arguing with me saying, “Amy, I think we should all throw together our marketing at the last minute and hope for the best.” But I do think there are a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs that feel like marketing is out of their wheelhouse. And they just don’t know how to create a marketing calendar or what it should look like.
So today I’m going to show you 6 simple steps for how to create a marketing calendar.
If you’re visual and you want to see what this looks, make sure you watch the video.
- Select 5-7 different lead generation strategies. There are no slam dunk, magic campaigns where you can do one thing and generate enough business to give you enough leads through a single chanel. The truth is, you’ll experience a trickle of leads from each thing you do. Your social media will bring in some leads. Your paid ads will bring in some leads. You’ll get some from referrals, or JV partners. You might get some from networking meetings. They all add up.
- Determine your frequency. Let’s be clear, I’m not saying you have to do every single activity every single month. You need to have multiple lead sources. But the frequency can be different for each of those activities. Maybe Social Media is constantly happening for you, but you only host live workshops every quarter. Maybe you do expo booths in the fall. You set the frequency that makes sense for your business.
- Figure out your production timelines for each one. This one is pretty critical. You need to have time to prepare for your marketing so that you can put your best foot forward. I’ve thrown together vendor booths in a day. But they weren’t as good as they would have been if I’d given myself a week. I’ve tried to host a live event with only two months to market and produce. Guess what happened? It was a small crowd. You need to understand how long it will actually take you to produce that event. And give yourself adequate time.
- Make sure you are not launching too many new things at once. Marketing overwhelm is real. And part of knowing how to create a marketing calendar is knowing how to space things out. I don’t recommend launching too many new campaigns at once. It’s a lot of work and you tend to find yourself with several half finished projects rather than completed campaigns that are generating leads for you.
- Space them out over the calendar for the next 12 months. Once you’ve determined when you will launch your new campaigns, go ahead and fill in all of the campaigns that are in maintenance. Then get to work scheduling. If you’ve decided to launch speaking as a marketing campaign, you’ll give yourself a month to get together a bio, headshots, a speaker one sheet, and maybe a highlight reel. Then you start pitching a certain amount of gigs every month. The consistent pitching is what I call maintenance. As soon as you have dates scheduled, you add them to the marketing calendar.
- Get to work! Most important step of all. Knowing how to create a marketing calendar is important. Actually following the calendar is more important. No one ever generated a million dollars in sales because they HAD a calendar. They generated the million dollars because the FOLLOWED the calendar and created consistent lead flow.
So now is your time! You know how to create a marketing calendar! Go to it and share with me what you love about having this calendar in place. Don’t forget to watch the youtube video so you can actually see how I track this.
