Creating your 2021 Marketing Launch/Promotional Calendar
December 28, 2020
OK, you’ve set your business goals for 2021 right? The next step is looking at your marketing and creating a launch/promotional calendar. When you plan your campaigns in advance you have a clear overview and path of what you need to achieve.
Plus no one wants to be scrambling last minute to promote a product, service or program! For every hour of planning, you save 10 hours in implementation!
I’ve got you covered with this step-by-step guide.
Step 1 – Set your marketing goals
These are DIFFERENT from your business goals, but they need to tie in with them. Examples of marketing goals:
Number of email subscribers
Increase Social media followers
Increase traffic to website
Increase your conversion rate
Reach a certain engagement %
The above are general, you will need to make these SMART goals. They must have a clear objective so you know without a doubt once you have achieved them. For example if you want to increase the number of email subscribers, what’s the exact number you want to get to?
Step 2 – Map out your Marketing
This is not a marketing plan, but a funnel that details the journey of someone becoming a customer and beyond. By mapping out each stage you’ll be able to create a growth framework as you will get a better understanding of how people convert to customers and how you can retain them.
Stage 1 – Awareness
This is the top of the funnel – the tactics that generate awareness. It’s about getting your business in front of people who don’t know about you.
What are the top 3 ways you are going to attract your ideal audience?
This could be blogs, social media, ads, videos.
Stage 2 – Interest
After a potential customer has heard about you through the awareness stage, this is where they become interested in how you can help them. The aim to create a new lead and have them as part of your community.
Generally, they will check your website. So how are you going to create some stickiness and get them to stay around? This can be from a content download or maybe you have live chat?
What could you offer for free to build up your community & engage them?
Stage 3 – Nurture
You need to continue to build a relationship with those in your community and give them a taste of what it would be like working with you. Let them see how you might be able to solve their pain points.
How are you going to nurture your community?
This can be done through a free trial, podcast or email marketing for example.
Stage 4 – Conversion
We’re flipping from marketing to sales here and letting them know how they can work with us. You are wanting to convert your community to customers.
What are the next steps they need to take to work with you? It could be an onboarding series from a free trial or an email inviting people to take part in your next program.
How will you let your community know how they can work with you?
Stage 5 – Loyalty or Delight
Use which ever you prefer the sound of. It’s much easier to retain a customer than to find a new one. So how are you going to wow them?
What are your top 3 ways to improve your customer experience in 2021?
Step 3 – What are you going to sell?
Work out what products, programs or services you are going to be selling in 2021. These obviously have a direct impact on reaching your financial goals and will form the basis for your launches/promotions.
You should have several offerings. Add each of them into the promotional calendar.
Signature offer
This is your #1 revenue generator that you will promote around twice a year. Your signature offering will typically generate up to 80% of your revenue in your business.
Upgrade Offering.
It’s easier to keep a client than find a new one. Plan in twice a year that you will invite your existing clients to upgrade into a next-level product, program, or service.
Smaller Offerings.
If you have a smaller program, service or product then fit in a promotion between your bigger launches.
Freebie Offerings.
This is how you build your community. It could be a free challenge, webinar, download etc to build your audience and email list.
Think about the way your clients are engaging with your business at different times of the year. Keep that in mind as you’re adding to your launch/promotional calendar.
Step 4 – HOW are you going to promote each offering.
You have an idea on when you’re going to promote each offering, but you need to create a plan on how you will be promoting them.
Will this be through email marketing, social media advertising, ambassadors or SEO? There are so many ways you can market, work out which ones suit your business and are most effective with your target audience.
There are 3 stages in the launch/promotion.
Pre-Launch. This is where you prime the audience so they know an offer is coming and will be excited for it.
This is when your program, offer, product goes live and you are actively promoting it.
Post Launch. This is when your cart is closed or promotion has ended. It’s where you review how you went and what you can improve on.
Quick Tips
The pre-launch stage starts around 4 -6 weeks before the launch.
Create and frame content around what pain your offering solves. Always allow people to qualify themselves.
YOU MUST BUILD AN AUDIENCE. This is essential as you do not want to market to a cold audience. Use the pre-launch stage to build an engaged audience that you can them launch your offering to.
