Module 11: Creating a Marketing Calendar

All the hard work is now done and it’s time to start planning out the actual implementation of your Marketing Plan.

Naturally, you’ll need to go into more details on action steps once this course is done, but for now you can lay out your high level plans for the year and how and when they’ll be implemented.

Start by Identifying Your Marketing Initiatives

Start by planning out your major initiatives for the year, based on what tactics you chose in your marketing mix, what your budget can afford, and which tactics are the most likely to help you achieve your goals. For example, an initiative could be to run a promotional webinar series in order to meet a goal of increasing leads by 50%.

Go back to your budget at this point and specify an amount that will be allocated to each initiative. That way, you can keep your costs under control and track your Return on Investment for each initiative as well. Be sure to adjust your budget numbers if you’ve decided you need more for one initiative vs. another.

Yearly and Monthly Planning

Determine when you will implement each initiative during the course of the year, both on a quarterly and monthly basis, so that you can take advantage of any seasonal trends.

In addition, you need to make sure you won’t be overtaxing your resources both on the people and financial level. Sure, you can always outsource tasks, but be sure that your own involvement isn’t stretched to breaking point.

Goals and Metrics

Set goals for each initiative and determine the metrics you’ll use to measure results. Look back at the section in this course on Tracking Results to get ideas of what metrics you can track.

An example goal for your webinar series might be to gather at least 200 new leads per webinar. The metrics you track might include webinar registrations, webinar attendance, and any downloads you send your webinar participants to.

Zero In on Your Action Plans

Decide on tactics and activities you’ll use to implement each initiative. Your 4 P’s tactics will help here too. For instance, your webinar series could be free, delivered via Google Hangouts and YouTube, promoted via social media, email, press releases, joint venture relationships, etc.

Be sure to identify the resources you’ll need for each initiative. For example, a webinar series might require guest speakers, content creators, a new delivery platform, etc

Finally, complete your action plan by breaking down each initiative even further. Include specific tasks, responsibilities and deadlines. To set deadlines, work backwards from the timing you specified in your yearly/monthly calendars. For example, the creation of each webinar’s content will require things like research, slide design, actual content etc. Some of that you may have to do yourself, but many things can be outsourced or delegated.

As mentioned, after this course you’ll need to go into even more detail to plan out the specific tasks, responsibilities and deadlines for each tactic and initiative. At this point, you can start by outlining the basics and filling in the rest later.

Action Steps

Review your goals and the 4 P’s tactics you brainstormed
Decide on at least 4 marketing initiatives you want to implement this year to achieve your goals (per quarter). Use the Yearly Marketing Plan Calendar.
Use the Monthly calendar (which follows the yearly one) to outline the timing for those tactics in a monthly format. Some initiatives may span several months, so be sure to note that. Remember to include ongoing marketing activities.
Use the Initiative Action Plan worksheets following the calendars to plan more of the details of each initiative, including the goal for each, tasks/activities, resources needed, who will be responsible, and deadlines.

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