The year is soon coming to an end. While you might feel that this is the time to just sit back and watch your email quiet down, you might also want to consider that this is actually the perfect time to start planning your 2015 promotional activities. Unless you really don’t want to grow and expand your business, a solid marketing calendar is crucial. Why not leave it until January? Here is why:
1) An important part of your marketing plan involves evaluating which past initiatives worked for you, and which ones didn’t. This will take you some time, and it will require for you to go over expense reports, analytics and other documentation, comparing them and drawing conclusions. Be prepared.
2) You will need time to do due research into upcoming marketing and industry-specific trends, (new?) tools you might want to incorporate, new ideas or initiatives, or even new team members you want to bring in. If you work within an organization, you will also need time to run your ideas through the appropriate channels, and most often than not, this process takes a very long time.
3) Timing. You will absolutely need to tie your promotional activities to your sales cycles. You don’t want to be caught wanting to launch a new product in March, while starting the promotional planning in mid-January.
4) Lastly, and most importantly, tying it all together, if you start planning in January, you simply won’t start working on your plan in January. Going through steps 1, 2 and 3 will take you a few weeks if you do them well. This means that the promotions during your new business year will be a few months short. We will leave it up to you to do the math as to how much (extra?) money you won’t bring in due to your late start.
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