How to Plan a Month of Marketing in One Afternoon – Seven Steps

Between the pressures of operating your own business and a sense of general overwhelm, marketing often gets pushed aside.

It becomes “just one more thing” on a very long to-do list.

However, there is this old expression that says: If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Having an actual marketing plan in place will not only ensure that things get done, but it is likely to dramatically improve the outcomes of your marketing campaigns.

You can do it in just a few hours, and when you consider the return on the time you spend on it, it will be time well spent.

What do you need to start?

a. You need to know the current state of your marketing efforts. What have you done recently, what has worked and what didn’t, and what is the state of your online presence?

How many visitors come to your website, and where do they come from? On each social media platform, what are you posting, and are the right people seeing it? If you did paid advertising, how well bid that go?

b. You need a block of quiet time. Depending on your business and skill set you might be able to do it faster, but budget 2 to 3 hours for it.

c. Your calendar.

d. Access to your social media profiles or pages, and your website.

e. A basic understanding of your target audience, and the audiences you deal with on your social media accounts.

How to plan a month of marketing in one afternoon:

Step 1: Set one clear goal for the upcoming month.

Depending on your situation and where you are at in your business journey, as well as the market you serve, you may want to simply get more visitors to your website, or get more inquiries, or generate more repeated business.

Focusing your plan around one single goal will guide your decisions, and simplify both the planning and the execution – not to mention it will be easier to achieve, especially if your reach isn’t huge yet.

Step 2: Decide which channels you want to use.

Be practical about it, and avoid spreading yourself – or the person you delegate the execution to – too thin.

Focus on channels you already use, and which either already sends you traffic, or holds the most promise (if you are a brand new business).

For instance, focus on your website, one social media platform, and one paid promotion channel. Or focus on your website, one social media platform, and say, a WhatsApp group you own (if you want repeat customers).

Keep it simple, and allow yourself to focus on growing one social media presence, as opposed to “trying to be everywhere”.

Step 3: Choose your core topics, ideally 3 to 5.

These topics will become the foundation of everything – in terms of content – that you put out for the month. Pick your topics around questions from customers or clients.

If your potential customers ask these questions, so do many other people in your target market.

Where applicable, link to previous blog posts of knowledge base pages, or other resources like tools or checklists in order to provide more insight and more value.

Step 4: Map your content onto your calendar.

Assign each topic to a specific week or time period. If you only do 3 topics for the month, those can be blocks of ten days each, or – if one topic deserves more attention than the others, two weeks for that topic and one week each for the remaining two topics.

Ideally, you should create a blog post or knowledge base article, or even a long form video, as well as social media posts derived from the content of the blog post.

If done properly, the blog post or Youtube video will eventually attract visitors from Google, while you will drive visitors from social media and whatever other channels you use.

Decide on a posting schedule. Keep it realistic – don’t plan a sprint if your workload doesn’t allow for it. he key is consistency, even if the tempo is slow.

Step 5: Plan your calls to action.

Based on your goal for the month, what do you want the reader or viewer to do next?

Do you want them to:

a. Contact you?

b. Read a blog post?

c. Download a checklist?

d. Fill out a survey?

e. Start shopping in your online store?

Be crystal clear about what you want your prospective customers or clients to do. Think in terms of a simple “yes or no” response, and try to make the call to action as compelling as possible. Think about their desired outcome from doing business with you.

Step 6: Plan your content repurposing.

One blog post can be broken down into several social media posts and/or short form videos.

The blog post can be converted to video using AI (if you lack the time or inclination to appear on camera yourself).

Google’s AI studio can – among many other things – summarize the blog post, and convert it to a PPTX presentation.

A summary of the post can become an email you send to your mailing list.

The bottom line is that you only have to do the hard work once – by creating the blog post. After that, it is all just a matter of repackaging it into smaller units, which allow you to reach more people on more occasions.

Step 7: Leave yourself some room for flexibility.

Instead of planning every single minute detail, allow yourself some space for new ideas, or urgent updates that you may need to share.

You might – for instance – find that one specific topic generates much more interest than the others, and you should allow yourself to exploit that.

Also, don’t aim for perfection. You will naturally get better at it as you do it more and more. Focus on consistency and progress. Improvement will come naturally.

Common marketing planning mistakes to avoid:

a. Don’t plan more content than you – or your designated delegate – can handle. Instead, plan for the amount  that you know you can execute comfortably and consistently.

b. Don’t blindly copy what competitors are doing. Their audience may be different from yours.

c. Don’t try to “go viral” with every social media post. Viral means broad interests. Broad interests means engagement from people not ready to do business with you. Engagement from the wrong people means that the algorithm will show it to those people first when you post your next update.

d. Don’t focus on tactics – focus on your goals. Tactics can evolve over time. Also, avoid “trendy” tactics. Trends only last for a short while, and then you have to start chasing the next trend.

Your simple marketing planning checklist:

a. Your goal for the month.

b. Channels chosen.

c. Topics chosen.

d. Content and repurposing planned.

e. Calendar planned.

f. Calls to action defined.

Conclusion:

Marketing CAN be complicated – but it doesn’t have to be. As with everything you do in life, the more you do it, the better you become at it.

Just be consistent, and use the resulting data to improve where possible.

If you have never sat down and crafted a monthly marketing plan, try it once and see how your results change.