2012 Marketing Planning

Its that time of year to start your 2012 marketing planning! We have been busy at B&A with helping clients with this. Every time I bring it up with any of them the first thing each and every one of them says is the same thing, "What?!?! How do I do that? Where do you start?"

We have a little trick that makes it easier for us. Get online and download the calendar of events for the groups and associates that you participate or your target customer participates. You can use serveral social calendars from your local area of events, associations or holidays. Then, determine which events are pertainent to your company and start creating some creative concepts based on how your organization will be involved in each of these events or around these events. Remember to make them relevant to the target and true to your brand and what you do. Once you have those down, work backwards on the calendar and set deadlines for specific deliverables for each event/creative concept (be realistic and give yourself and your team some time to work on things and don't push too close to hard deadlines like getting material printed). There you go, you have your marketing plan for the year. All you have to do is put it in a document to track and make the calendar available to all those that now have deadlines to meet.

For example, B&A's 4th Birthday is July 1 and this year our creative concept for a birthday campaign will be 'Stand Out From the Rest'. We will run the campaing for 1 month before and 2 weeks after and will set our deadlines for print and consumables at May 23rd for distribution on June 1 and we will set our content writing dealine for May 30th for social media and any traditional mediums that we incorporate. That's just one campaign for the year but it will give you an idea of how we plan it.

Planning ahead like this will keep you from scrambling at the last minute to put something together for campaigns and only doing it half as good as you should have. B&A will be getting its calendar this week and starting our planning for 2012, then everything will go on our digital public calendar and we have no excuses to miss any deadlines (missing Champagne Thursday deadlines is just inexcuseable here). Do you have any quick tips or tricks for your marketing planning? We would love to hear them, so drop us a line and chat. Have a safe and happy holiday!

~Ronii