Hey, it's Samantha Hartley of the Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast, and this is Season 4, and it's all about marketing.How to get those perfect clients in the door so that you can serve them and have a wonderful time and a profitable and joyful consultancy. Today, specifically, I want to talk about planning for this year. We're still early, as you're hearing this in the year. And actually you can plan at any time. That's a little secret if you don't have a plan, this is a good time to make one. One of the things I noticed is that no business that I've ever worked with has had a plan like almost literally none. Right. Even when I was with the Coca Cola company and I went into the field, those offices didn't have plans either.

Here's my coke marketing planning story. A lot of times they say don't market, don't plan like the big companies do. You're a little business, you're going to plan totally differently. Well, listen to this part, we would create this gigantic marketing plan every year for corporations. It would be this huge PowerPoint deck inside of a three-ring binder kind of thing.

I would come back to my office. I did this for years, three years in a row at least coming back to my office, put this gigantic deck down, open it up into the page that had the marketing calendar. I would take that page out. I would put that on my wall where I saw it every day. That's what drove my marketing. That's how I knew where we were in the year, what we were doing, what was ahead of it, etc. It was like a Gant chart of the year on a calendar of like here's what we do in January, here's what we do in February. This thing will go from March to April, etc..

Right. You want to have something like that for you and your business, like look at the whole year, which holidays or times of year are relevant to you. Do you have a business that really hits it big in September, like more seasonal business, or are you consistently selling throughout? A lot of training companies will get a lot of business around September because we associate that with back to school, other health obviously, companies are going to be like year-end or whenever health benefits buyers are buying its year end, when everybody kicks off because they've got new budgets, things like that. You want to have an idea for that in your marketing and build that in. The marketing calendar is like one of the most important concepts that you can take away. And if you have a one-page marketing plan, which is my goal for today for you, then a lot of it can be based around what that calendar says. So, the first thing that you need to do when you are planning your year out, if you're planning your 2021 right now, is prioritize yourself, make sure that you and your home life are stable. Right. I want you to go through there and take all of the holidays, the school holidays, where you need to be available, birthdays, family vacations, all of those kind of things. Go ahead and block those out of your calendar and then add for yourself some vacation.

There was one year I was working with a mentor and he had me preschedule vacation. He said, how much vacation do you want to take? I said this much and I said, well, I want to alternate. I want to have like a week where we go somewhere for vacation and then a week that's a staycation where I can just chill out and be by myself. And one of those years I chilled out, I like going to this woman's monastery out in the middle of nowhere. It was like on a cattle ranch or something. It was just the best time. What does that year show me if I block out the vacation time in advance, I take it so there's a tip for you block out your calendar when your vacation is going to be. Well, what if I can't afford to go away? You can still take a vacation, and stay where you are. Well, what if I have a bunch of client stuff during that time? Well, guess what? It's your vacation. You're trying to take care of yourself. Don't schedule a bunch of client stuff on that time. What if there's an immovable conference that I want to go to? OK, reschedule it, but don't cancel it. Reschedule that vacation time. This is how you keep yourself performing at your best, is you take some time away to recharge and become a better version of yourself. I personally am a huge fan of the four-day weekend when we had Thanksgiving or certain holidays or whatever, and we ended up having to take four-day weekends. I was like, dude, this is a really great thing. I don't need a ton of time off, but I do love a four-day weekend. How many of those do you want to go through there and block off, create your business your way and your clients are going to understand things, but they'll understand it if you say it and are committed to it, like I'm not available during those days or actually will be on vacation then or that week I only have three days to meet available. OK, right. You make the rules, you decide.

That's the first thing that I want you to do is prioritize you taking care of yourself, any professional commitments, any conferences you need to go through, go through a whole year long looking calendar and see that in advance. That way nothing jumps up and surprises us. A fun thing that I like to do is to take all of the holidays that “normal people” take, not self-employed people take, they take things like, Veterans Day and Memorial Day, right they are taking those holidays, so go ahead and block those out and then anything that is important to you. Prioritizing yourself is going to make you a more centered and present business owner. It's super important for you.

The second thing that I want you to do, and here's where we start to get into the meat of this thing, I want you to think about what your number one outcome for this year is. For some people, that will be a number. Some people will say, I want to hit 600,000 this year. Some people will say I want to have 10 clients this year or 100 clients or whatever.

Right. It'll be measured in terms of number of clients. Some people will say, I want to feel in the flow this year. It does not matter to me what my clients choose in that terminology, what motivates them, what desired outcome they have. What is important to me is that whatever they say is something that pulls them into action, really inspires them so I want that desired outcome that number one outcome for the year that you say, I want it to be something that fires you up. And if you have to list a few things, if you say it's going to be 600,000, but I'm going to get there peacefully, I'm going to have an exciting and fun time, whatever you want to lay out for yourself.

So first start with that, because that's the year that we're going to create with this plan. In order to hit that, in order to achieve that, whether it's peace or number of clients or a number, what do you need to do in your business? I want you to think about three main initiatives that you can do that will help you to get there.

And if you're not totally sure, look at what has worked for you in the past to help you achieve the number that you had last year, to help you get the number of clients that you want to help you be peaceful.

Maybe just planning this out will help you get more peacefully, get there more peacefully than you would have otherwise. If you think about what those major initiatives are and some of these can be posting to social media every day, doing outreach through Facebook Messenger, doing LinkedIn Messenger outreach, speaking at 20 people's events, whether virtual or in-person, whatever comes to mind for you as the core ways that you're going to get there. Those are the things that I want you to note down, working my referral network, networking with new audiences, those core three things I want you to decide what they're going to be for the year is what I'll say now, we're lean small businesses. We can pivot any time we want to. Probably for the year is going to mean and this is the next step here is like, what do you need to do? What's your desired outcome for the first quarter and then for this month?

I really like to chunk planning down into those phases. Like if I look at the whole big picture and then we say, well, what do we need to do? We can do the first half a year or the first quarter. And then what do we need to be doing like right now? What can we be starting right now? Sometimes your team and you have to learn a thing. First quarter is going to be about launching and learning this thing and the second quarter is going to be ramping up and really focusing more on that thing. Third quarter might be like putting a budget behind it, like amplifying it with ads or something. You can see that your plan can evolve over the year. I like to get really specific with the first quarter and leave the rest of the quarters like, we get the idea as long as you keep in mind, like that in the second quarter is when a lot of these speaking engagements start to happen. Or in the third quarter is when we're going to hire people to support us with our posting or outreach or something like that. Keep in mind that there will be business ramifications that come from each of the things that you lay out.

If you in this second section, you've written down your desired outcome for the year and then the quarter and then the month, then the next thing that we do is we start to plan our daily marketing activities. And I've spoken in the past about the idea of having a daily marketing plan. What I really like is that for most businesses, a lot of their work is like, what am I doing on a daily basis? And if you have a team, then it's like what? We divide up the responsibilities, but what are the things that we as a business do on a daily basis? And it's the implementation usually of those core activities that you're doing for the year.

Daily marketing is really about doing the specific right things that you need to do, getting those done and making them happen. And what I think is interesting is that a lot of people want to have tons and tons of stuff written down on this plan and then they don't implement and they get really discouraged. What I love to do is like have one thing to do. What's the core focus that we're going to do and what are the activities that we need to support that? So if you're going to do content marketing and I'm going to be talking this season a lot more about content marketing, then what are the activities that support doing that? Who is going to be doing the writing? Who's going to be doing the social posting? Are there going to be graphics associated with this? What's the follow up going to be? Will this content marketing lead into a funnel? How do we follow up with people who engage with the content marketing? If there's one thing that's happening on a daily basis, then what are the other activities that will support that activity? And remember, it's really about less about the quantity of things done and more about consistency of getting those things done.

The last piece of this is to put this. I really like to have it on a one-page plan that I can look at every day. If I were to create that together with you, we would have at the top is who we're targeting. Because I always like to keep in mind who this is. You can have the name of an avatar. You can have the demographic of who this is. It could be like business consultants or it could be my avatar. Sharon, who is a human resources leader and management consultant. Right. Having that at the top, the next thing that I like to have on this plan is like, what's the offer so that we know if Sharon gets interested, what is the thing that we're going to be talking to her about? I find that many consultants do not have this piece clear in their minds exactly what is the thing that we would do for Sharon were she to respond. Now, let's imagine that Sharon is the leader or C level person at an organization. If I begin to have a conversation with her, what will I be doing for that organization? So you may do whatever they need, but let's think about like what the outcomes are that most organizations are looking for and have that clear, because the next piece here is to have the message I like to have on this page that just the two liner of the message so that we're clear. That message says who this is for, what the problem is that we're solving, what the outcome is that's contained on that same page.

And then, the last piece is the actions like what are the actions that we're taking for the quarter, for the month and on a daily basis to ensure that we meet more Sharon's. I know that's a lot. And if you're chopping vegetables, you didn't have a chance to write things down. I want you to take away the idea that we can pre-think about the year. We can think about the outcome that we want to have for this year, and then we can boil all of that down to one page that can guide our daily activities, keep us focused, keep us moving towards the outcome that we want.

So if you would like my template for making a one page marketing plan, then just check for the link in the show notes and I'd be happy to share mine with you. If also you'd like to get help in creating a one page marketing plan or figuring out where to find your perfect clients and get more of them then I urge you to get in touch with me

If you would like to get in touch with me to get my help with your one-page marketing plan, or if you'd like to double your revenues in 2021 without exhaustion, then please get in touch with me. You'll find links to connect with me on all my social channels in the show notes. Thank you for watching and I am wishing you a profitable, joyful consulting business in 2021.