Planning your marketing serves as a guiding compass for your business. By aligning your marketing efforts with your business goals, you can give your business much needed clarity for the year ahead.

Being organised allows you to predict changes in the market, identify new opportunities and manoeuvre around any challenges you may face. As the economic climate is still unpredictable, this is where being proactive with your marketing is essential.

I suggest that creating a 12-month marketing calendar is the best way to ensure clarity and direction for the year ahead. To simplify this, break it down into 3-month, 1-month and 1-week periods to establish what you’re going to do. Next, look at what your marketing efforts were last year. Where did you advertise? What worked? What didn’t work? This can help provide some guidance on what you need to do in the marketing space.

To get started with a marketing calendar, define your business goals for the year, analyse your key competitors and market, define objectives for what you want to achieve with your marketing (this could be to increase sales, or to increase brand awareness), and create a strategy of how you will execute them.

At Metros Marketing, we are confident that being proactive with your marketing is the key to success.