Track Your Marketing Schedule a Year Ahead

To keep track of what days are meant for what in your calendar, you need to figure out how much business development time you’ll need, how many client days you’ll need and how many “off” days you’ll need, including vacation time. I recommend buying a laminated year-at-a-glance calendar and designating each day’s “purpose” with a colored sticker (mine are blue for client days, red for business development days and green for free-days, vacations and weekends) similar to the Excel spreadsheet I created for the “Be sure to take time off” section. Build these in to your schedule at the beginning of the year and you’ll never feel like you don’t have enough time off or time for marketing. Client example: A client of mine, a real estate broker, decided to take this even one step further. Because much of her marketing depends on several mailings to specific buildings she covers in her territory, she wanted to keep track of them on this yearly at-a-glance wall calendar. On it, she designated a system for seeing what mailings would go to which buildings on what weeks. So it looked like this:

• Mailing 1 would go to Buildings A, B and C on the first of every month. - Mailing 1 would then go to Buildings D, E and F on the second week of every month (and so on for the rest of the month).

Each week of the month, she now has a system for sending a mailing, staggered so that she doesn’t get overwhelmed, but that will also keep her on track. Then Mailing 2 goes out to the first set of buildings on the first week of the month, and so on. That way, each month, each building receives a systematic mailing, that’s 12 mailings per year. Best of all, she doesn’t even do the mailings anymore. Her assistant does it for her. Your Client Attraction Assignment: Get yourself a wall calendar that is erasable. I also use the color coded removable round stickers. Then spend some time putting the colored stickers on the days that correspond to the sticker. You’ll find that you have a bird’s eye view of your entire year and now, you just need to follow the simple system you’ve set up. So easy!