January is the time of year when many of my long-term clients request a session on planning a 12 month marketing plan so we can clearly see where we’re going for the year ahead. I’ve completed so many lately I thought it was worth compiling some of the top questions that stem from those sessions into this post in the hope it helps you too.

But I want you to know that you don’t need to wait till January to start a 12 month plan. It can happen any time of year – from the beginning of a fiscal or financial year to the start of a new business project.

Either way, the 12 month marketing plan template and example I’m going to share with you will guide you on what you need to achieve in to arrive at where you want to be in one year.

I’ve spoken previously about creating a template aimed at public relations campaigns, I’ve also created a seasonal marketing calendar to help with monthly marketing themes to help inspire content through evergreen events to fill your plans. But what about the framework for a one page marketing plan? Where do you start?

You want something that avoids pushing you into overwhelm and frustration.

What is a 12 Month Marketing Plan?

We’ve all heard the saying before: “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail”.

Some research suggests those who plan double their chance at success. Maybe you’ve experienced that yourself, where a little bit of planning has gone a long way towards achieving a goal you’ve set yourself. The reason is often that we’ve given ourselves specific steps towards a specific outcome within a defined period of time.

A 12 month marketing plan is really a marketing strategy with a schedule of marketing activities to provide you with a high level view of where you’d like to be and how you’re going to get there.

It’s the opportunity to take a holistic look at your marketing for the coming year and understand where you want it to lead you. What do you want to create in your business? What are the steps required to get there?

Creating a marketing plan allows you to reverse engineer the entire process and will help define your quarterly and monthly marketing plans that ensure you implement. You know that saying about “eating an elephant”…

So you end up with a holistic view of your marketing in a 12-month format, which can then be broken down into more achievable goals and action steps per quarter, month and week.

Often, the big problem with creating an annual marketing calendar is that people get discouraged not too long into the plan because it all feels too overwhelming. In her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Angela Duckworth says: “Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare”.

To avoid that, download this 12 month marketing planner. This is a plan I’ve been using annually since the early days of my business.

What to Include In Your Marketing Plan

Knowing what to include in your 12-month marketing plan can be daunting.

There are some key topics that need to be highlighted BEFORE you even begin to map out your one-year marketing plan, including:

• What you learnt from the previous 12 months – what will you take into the new year and what will you leave behind
• What are your financial goals for the year that tie into the vision and mission for your business
• Key products and what ratio of profit they create
• What ideal client the products are aimed at
• Whether there will be launches for them (and when that will be) or if there will be evergreen campaigns (and the strategy for consistency)
• The pathway that moves them from awareness to investing with you
• Auditing the assets you already have to discover future opportunities
• Forecast your numbers – how many impressions from your brand awareness campaigns, how many leads generated, how many sales conversations booked and how many conversions you need to achieve your overall financial goal

Using the free marketing plan template

To avoid starting from scratch and tip you into overwhelm, I’ve created a free marketing strategy template for you to download and instructions on how best to use it to make this as simple and easeful as possible.
You can download that here.

Review your year by plotting out the highlights from each month

What did you have to celebrate month by month in 2020? You’ll be surprised at just how much you’ve actually achieved.

What worked from the previous 12 months that you want to continue?

And, likewise, ask what didn’t work that you want to stop doing? When I work with a client, we dive deep into this area because often this is where the gold is hidden that holds clues for what you need to do to achieve your goals the following year.
In this version at least, you need to take a look at the things that generated leads and sales. Then look for the clues for leverage.

What were the biggest lessons you learned?

Often, we’ve given some challenges throughout our year and these are sometimes blessings in disguise. There are things we’re taught that help us grow. What were they for you? How will you use this information going into a new year or a new 12-month plan?

What seeds did you plant this year that are ready to come to life next year?

This is one of my favourite questions, because often the work I do with clients is creating a holistic strategy and then putting in place the systems to allow that strategy to come to life. Some systems don’t happen overnight and we can get impatient waiting for them to yield results. But there’s no greater feeling than going into a new year (calendar or financial) with all those systems in place and knowing they’re ready to start revealing results for you.

Next, it’s time to step into the year ahead. Diving deeper with the template and workbook here will help a lot when you reach this point, but some simple questions to ask yourself…

What are your financial goals for the coming 12 months?

Take a look at what you achieved during the past 12 months and choose something that’s going to see your business grow and stretch you, but isn’t so big that you’ll become discouraged part-way through the year.

List out all the products, programs and offers

Make a list of all the products programs and offers you have and determine what ratio of profit they created during the past 12 months.

This is often an eye-opener to what you might want to let go of and, equally, where you might want to put some more marketing effort into because it’s yielding good results with little effort.

If you decide you want them part of your goals for the coming 12 months, then you need to ensure you’re clear on who they’re for, whether there’ll be launches for them (and when that will be) or if there’ll be evergreen (and the strategy for consistency).

This is also a chance to think about at a time plan for further projects.

One thing to always focus on when it comes to product development, is knowing the value proposition of a product. If you can’t clearly articulate what the value of your product or program is to your ideal client, then the chances of selling it will be difficult.

What is the pathway that moves your ideal client from awareness to investing in these programs?

This is often a missing piece in many marketing plans. If you don’t understand WHERE your marketing is leading people, then you’re really causing noise in the market with little return.

We want to create purposeful marketing and the way to do that is to be clear on the messages and platforms on the front end and who you’re targeting, followed by understanding the pathway that allows them to move from awareness to investment. Learn more about soulful sales funnels.

Audit the assets you already have to discover future opportunities

This isn’t just a yearly task, but something I do regularly with new clients. In fact, the past month alone I’ve done four audits of sales funnels and marketing strategies.

We often have so many opportunities in our business that get overlooked, whether that’s a blog post that’s gaining organic traffic but doesn’t have an opt-in offer on it or a successful opt-in that doesn’t go further than a welcome email. These are opportunities to be leveraged.

Forecast your numbers for the coming year

You want to understand:

• How many impressions from your brand awareness campaigns do you need to gain,
• how many leads will you generate,
• how many sales conversations do you need to have booked and
• how many conversions do you need to achieve your overall financial goal you originally set

Next, plot out the tasks for the coming year. Think about what you want the highlights to be for the next 12 months that you’ll be able to celebrate this time next year.

In the next part, I’ll share an example of my plan.

A 12 Month Marketing Plan Example

I want to give you an example of an annual marketing plan and what it might look like. Due to privacy with my clients, I can’t share one of theirs but I do want to show you a real life example. So I’m sharing mine for 2021.

Before I do, here’s a quick snapshot of my review…

I identified that my biggest revenue providers were my masterminds and 1:1 coaching and consulting clients. I gain digital sales throughout the year, but they don’t compare to the higher touch offers. The energy to launch lower priced offers isn’t worth it for me, particularly when my business isn’t built around high volume low touch, so these remain evergreen.

Each of my products already have soulful sales funnels attached to them, but auditing each of them provided some new opportunities and areas for improvement.

And now for my one page marketing plan example:

As you can see from my marketing plan, it includes:

• The Promotions in green
• The Delivery of those programs in pink (although I’ve actually excluded it from this example)
• Audience Build in blue is the final part so my email list is always growing

I include in there my regular marketing activities:

• Power posts – or epic blog posts. These are generally more than 1500 words long – like this one! The aim is to build organic traffic, build my email list (so it’s usually attached to the “Audience Build” activity) and connect with my audience.
• Videos, which this year will be more tightly linked to the blog post I’m writing, but will also be leveraged across Youtube, Facebook and LinkedIn.
• A weekly eNewsletters to help continue to build relationships with my list
• Facebook ads to grow my list so I have someone to send my eNewsletter to!! Although, more of my focus lately has been on retargeting ads to bring people already familiar with me back to my site.

These are the things I commit to being regular with.

Next, I’ll look at how many sales I’ll require that month to reach my overall financial goal and how many discovery calls are needed to reach those sales. If you’re unsure of your marketing activities, starting with this step first can help.

It’s not in this version, but it’s also wise to add in your budget for each month too if you’re needing to print marketing material, sponsor events or run advertising campaigns.

One of the beauties of laying out your 12 month marketing plan like this is that it prevents you from over promoting to your email list. One of the challenges I had earlier in my business life was that I was promoting back to back and wearing my email list out.

I see this a lot in my own inbox now, with some entrepreneurs and small businesses always in promo mode or even promoting two things at once – which is never smart. You simply confuse your audience and they end up buying nothing.

You can also more easily see what budget is required depending on when and what you’re promoting throughout the year.

The other thing to consider is that your plan will look very different to the next business. For example, one of my real estate agent clients has an extensive marketing calendar that takes in many varied strategies and multiple budgeting needs, while one of my health coaches has a simple 3-channel approach. Do what makes the most sense to you, your business and your ideal client.

Marketing Activities For Your Annual Plan

Still unsure exactly what YOU should be putting into YOUR plan?

If you’re just starting out in business or really unclear on where your ideal client is “hanging out” to know where to market, pause to spend some time interviewing your ideal client. Learn more about ideal clients here.

In the meantime, here are some strategies you might want to explore further:

• Content creation strategies
• Social media strategies
• PR strategies
• Referral strategies
• Collaboration strategies
• Public speaking strategies
• Advertising strategies
• Online marketing strategies
• In-person networking and events strategies
• Direct mail strategies

Many of these topics I talk about on this blog to help get you started.

Working Your Plan into 90-day Marketing Strategies

When I create a 90-day marketing plan, it’s this map that I look back to and the questions that ensure I stay in alignment all year round and don’t end up with bright shiny object syndrome – that is, that I go off following all the latest marketing fads. This has long been a weakness for me and I’m well aware of it, so I put things in place to ensure I can use my creativity without going too far off track.

Download a copy of your marketing plan so you can ensure you have a clear path to follow this year and create your best year yet.

If you’d like to book a 1.5-hour session to create either your 12-month plan and 90-day marketing plan, please reach out.

Building in a Celebration Plan

Yes, you need to build a celebration plan alongside your marketing plan. Why? Because otherwise you never stop to fully appreciate all you achieve. Women, in particular, are notorious for not pausing and taking stock. We tend to just keep going and this is where we end up burning out, losing momentum or resenting our businesses.

Your celebration can be as big or small as you want. Mine are often booking a facial, buying a book or even planning and taking a mini holiday.

When it comes to celebrating, you need to be checking in EACH week. You’ll have at least something you can celebrate each week and this is important to do. Find a mastermind group to ensure you do celebrate weekly, along with setting a goal you can work towards and use the group to hold you accountable to.

If you’re not part of a mastermind, take a look at what it’s like inside a women’s online mastermind group.

And make sure to download your 12 month marketing plan to start – and the continue – 2021 strong!