The Problem with Marketing Calendars

marketing-calendar-problemsI opened up my email today and noticed quite a few people talking about marketing calendars. I even saw a few screen shots of people’s calendars that said things like:

Feb 1 Send email about chocolate
Feb 3 Upload chocolate blog post
Feb 5 Start promoting Reggies book

Some of the marketing calendar suggestions just made me chuckle.

Just because you put your to-do’s on a calendar doesn’t mean you have a strategy, doesn’t mean you understand your customer base and doesn’t mean you’re going to be any more successful tomorrow than you were yesterday.

A marketing calendar needs much more thought than putting to-do’s on paper. A strategy laid out and thought through lays out on a calendar quite nicely. It’s not as if you’re going to implement an entire strategy in one day, right? So don’t even begin to put one together until you understand these things:

1. What is your audience trying to achieve in life?
2. What are their steps in achieving that goal?
3. What parts of that “ladder” can you help you audience achieve and how can you best deliver those lessons?
4. In what other ways does your audience like to engage?
5. How do you reach both the novice and expert in your community? And how are the ladders to their next achievements different?
6. Where can you find people who would gain value from your community throughout the year? How do you reach them there? And where do you direct them on your site to help them best?

. . . and that’s just the beginning. When you can answer those questions you can start to put together a plan that you layout on a calendar. And once laid out you can start to pre-sell to your audience what is coming to get the excitement building.

There is another part of your marketing strategy that doesn’t fit on a calendar. That’s the autoresponder strategy. Once you’ve built your automated marketing pieces, you’ll want to populate your marketing calendar with moments and opportunities you’ll have to drive people to enter the funnel.

These are the kinds of things we teach in the Marketing Calendar Blueprint. Not only that but we help you understand how to build an audience today and then roll it into tomorrow’s lesson. Then build more tomorrow and continue grow the snowball again.

When you’re scouring the web for marketing calendar tips, make sure the tips are based on strategy not on convenience. Check out our Marketing Calendar Blueprint, you already wish you’d done that last year.