A landscape marketing plan is crucial to increasing profits and attaining business goals.
Good morning! It’s January and this is the month we’re working on improving and making massive changes within your business. That requires planning and thought and putting dates down on paper and saying, “This is what we’re going to execute.”
One of the most important things to work on right now, is the landscape marketing plan. The more sales and more leads you bring in, the more confidence you have to hire and make better business decisions. The way you actually bring in additional sales is to start with your marketing calendar. What’s going to happen? When is it going to happen? When do I need to do X, Y and Z to make that happen?
Let me give you an example. You’d want to think through what direct mail you want going out this year, what door hangers you want going out, a new website you want to launch, or maybe you want to create a new web page and then create a pay-per-click Google AdWords that points to that landing page. Maybe you’ve got email blasts that you want to send out, up-sell offers, or you have emails you want to send out to past clients to try to renew them. You want to think through all these different things you want to do, then you want to put them on the calendar.
Let’s use an example. Let’s say on May 5th you want to promote some service that May is the perfect time of year to buy that service. It’s when your client needs it. May 5th you might want to send an email and then three days later you might want to send a followup email. Then for every client that hasn’t bought from one of the two emails, maybe on May 10th you want to send out a postcard or better said, maybe on May 10th you want that postcard to arrive at their home. What’s that going to take?
Number one, put those dates on your marketing calendar. Number two, decide when you need to write the two emails? Maybe those emails will only take you two or three hours to write and you decide you want to write those a few days in advance. Back up on your calendar and maybe on April 26th you schedule the first part of your morning to write those two emails and get those two emails loaded into your software system so that you can send them.
For sending the postcard, that’s a bit more work. You’re going to have to write the copy, have a designer lay it out, get it to the printer and then you’re going to have to have the post office deliver it. Then you want to consider, are you sending bulk which could take as many as twelve days to arrive to your potential client. Or, if you’re sending first class, it could probably be there the next day.
You might need to start that process six weeks in advance. You need to go all the way back to the very end of March. Schedule some time on the calendar to write the copy, to get that copy and your basic design outline to a designer, and then schedule a date to get that to the post office. Take into consideration if you’re mailing first class or bulk, so that it will actually arrive on the 10th or whatever that date was that I said.
Think about all the different things that have to happen in your business, not just the date when the piece needs to go out, but the dates that are required to actually execute. Think through all of that for the entire year for everything that you want to have happen. That way you can delegate tasks, you can work on your parts and can make sure that everything happens to insure you have the absolute best, most profitable, highest growth year you can possible have. If you don’t plan it in advance, it’s not going to happen and then you’re going to have another year pretty similar to what you had last year.
Good luck!
