Do you have a plan for your marketing this year? Do you have a clear roadmap for what you're going to do every month, every week, every quarter? (However frequent it needs to be for you.) Do you have a plan that is going to help you actually reach your goals? The truth is that if I were to just walk up to you randomly at a coffee shop, or if I were to come into a meeting and say, “Hey, give me your yearly marketing plan,” a lot of small and medium sized businesses don't have that figured out yet.
That's okay. That's what we do. We help you create those marketing strategies. I'm going to give you a tool today that's going to help you roadmap what the next year could look like for you. We've done this with all of our clients over the past few weeks. We've had lots of questions, so I figured maybe it's time that we just kind of give you the roadmap to the success for your marketing strategy.
The problem that a lot of people are facing is that it is overwhelming, it is scary, to create a yearly marketing plan. It's especially scary when you don't even know where to start. What are those categories of thought? How do you create a social calendar or create an email schedule or anything like that when you're really just kind of flying by the seat of your pants?
You're creating whatever is necessary for next week... this week. Obviously, it doesn't work well that way. We're going to start by identify your primary content. What is primary content? Primary content is something that you have created originally. So this is an article. This is a blog post. This is a video like what you're watching right now. This is primary content.
It is the long form way to educate and inform your audience. It is also the thing that you're selling. You are selling your expertise. You are selling your information and your education that you can provide to your customers. One example of that might be a new product or service that you have. It may be an event that you have coming up.
It could be a presentation that you're giving. It can be so many different things. But the point is you need to create long form primary content because everything else feeds from that. The second element, and we'll talk about this in another video, but distribution strategy. This is your LinkedIn articles. This is Vimeo or YouTube videos that are then published via a newsletter email, texted to people.
There are lots of different forms of distribution, but the point is this is how we are blasting that long form content out to a lot of people. However many people you have on your current client list, your prospects list, event attendees... there are lots of different ways for you to gather a lot of contact information really quickly and start pushing out this information to establish yourself as the expert.
Now, this is where it gets really cool because everyone is scared about what is social media going to be? How am I going to come up with what needs to be on our social media? It's easy. Take your primary content. That content that you're producing every month or bi monthly or even quarterly and break it down into bite-sized pieces to send out to your followers, to your audience.
What's nice about this audience is that they already have shown some interest. They've already shown some care in you, right? You've connected with them on LinkedIn or Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or any of those platforms. As you are communicating your primary content message in those bite-sized pieces, you also want to be weaving in your story, which is really the story of your customer, right?
This is the story brand method that we follow. This is that framework where you are simply stating the problem... solution... result of working with you. What problem do you solve that your clients, your customers are facing? Right? What is your solution to that and what does it ultimately result in: away from failure... toward success? Whatever that needs to be defined as. You are weaving that message into your primary content.
So if you can establish your brand message one time and you can stick to it, weave that in throughout the entire year. Because what that does is it just continually supports whatever initiative you may have. What I would do is I would start with your yearly goal, your yearly plan. What is the thing that has to happen in 2023?
Right. Then break it down into quarters. There are seasons when you are having tons of conversations and you might not be getting a ton of business. There are other times when those people are ready to do business with you, so they just keep coming on board, keep contacting you, keep trying to get more information from you. So to of boil all of this down...
Get your roadmap for the year, your yearly goal, your quarterly initiatives, and then what each month is going to do to support those quarters. Once you have that roadmap, you're going to avoid the need of worrying about what to do next. You have your plan in place, and from that you'll be more confident communicating to your audience, which is going to set you up for success and growth in 2023.
Figured now would be a good time to release this video to send out this message because this is the roadmap that a lot of people are looking for. Maybe you don't have a marketing partner yet who can function as your marketing department, who can be doing this thinking for you if you found this interesting. Reach out. We would love to have more conversation about what your 2023 roadmap looks like and what Haven can do to support you in that.
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