End the “late night – last minute” marketing planning. Avoid the stress by future-proofing the peaks and troughs in your business.

Your Annual Marketing Calendar is a tool that helps you stay on track towards your sales/business goals. This is the one thing that makes a huge difference to your stress levels in frantically busy times and smooths out the quiet times too.
With some thought you can take the stress out of organising your sales and marketing activities by preparing a process to drip-feed it throughout the coming year.
Why do I need one?
Every business large and small should have a strategy. It is your business roadmap that gets you from A to B in a systematic way.
A strategic plan generally works on 3 important questions.
- Where are we now?
- Where do we want to be?
- How do we get there?
What should I do to create one?
Think of an Annual Marketing Calendar in the same way as you do a strategic plan. It is your action plan to promote your products, services, launches, events etc in a systematic way. Start at the end date in your calendar, then work backwards filling in all the actions that need to happen in the weeks before for your marketing strategy to be rolled out in a timely fashion. Simple!
Your calendar will be driven by your business sales/marketing goals. It might be annual, seasonal, monthly, event driven, product driven, trend driven etc. When you work that out, fill in all the big dates and then start working the action required to complete each one.
How does this help my stress levels?
You might find you have created too much work for yourself in one month. Now you have the chance to shift the end date and redistribute the workload more evenly.
By spreading them over the year you might find you haven’t left yourself enough distance between newsletters or advertising to promote them all to their best advantage? Change a newsletter/advertising date or change a promotion date to allow the best promotional opportunities you have.
Have you left yourself enough downtime to prep for the biggest workloads you undertake throughout the year? What can you shift now that you can see the stress you are likely to bring upon yourself if you don’t?
I need a break!
Have you left yourself enough days “work free” and “prep free” to take some time away? If not clear some space and move some timelines, because one of the benefits of being in business is to give yourself that freedom.
What happens in the long run?
By working up an Annual Marketing Calendar your future-proof the peaks and troughs. You will stop wishing you had put some extra marketing in place and avoid the stress of “late night/last minute” marketing when you are busy. Because when you are quiet it is usually too late! Simple!
About Sherryn and Marketing Talk
Listed among 20 Australian entrepreneurial women in AIM's Management Today Magazine 2011, Sherryn is a marketing consultant, industry speaker, workshop trainer and author on a mission to get Perth businesses more noticed, remembered and referred.
Her knowledge is drawn from 30 yrs managing state branches for national corporations and consultancies before hanging out her shingle Marketing Talk to work with SMEs in 2007. Grab the free resources or register for her monthly newsletter in the right hand side bar to receive marketing tips, invitations to future DIY workshops, coffee conversations, LinkedIn and Facebook training.







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