It’s 2015, Ready or Not!

2014 was a good year for our team, both professionally (worked with many great clients, published our first book, & developed the ConExecU concept) and personally (new relationships, traveling, and our first Brand Constructor baby).

It is already a week into 2015, so I ask you – What will be different this year? How are you going to make 2015 awesome?

You need a plan and the right tools. Here is our easy 3-step process to making an actionable marketing plan to achieve your loftiest goals.

Step 1 – List out the 50 things you want to accomplish this year; include company, professional, and personal items. (50 isn’t that many; trust me – I’ve done this process for a few years now.) You’re not writing 50 goals, just individual items you want to be done. Do you want to be active on LinkedIn & Twitter, attend a conference, overhaul your brand, read a specific book? You can take 3-5 goals and reverse engineer them by listing out the elements needed to achieve them.

Step 2 – Break out your 50 things into four quarters of the year. Breaking it up will help you prioritize and break up your 50 things into manageable pieces and get things done. If that conference you want to attend is in June, put it in the second quarter. A website or brand overhaul may take more time, so move that to the third quarter or it might be urgent, so you need to start on it now – it is your decision. (Make sure you share your priorities and sense of urgency with your boss if you need their approval on the budget. We’ve seen numerous marketers have their goals stalled out, not because of lack of money in the budget, but because they didn’t express the importance of the need.)

Step 3 – Block off time in your calendar for these items. I have a separate Outlook calendar for the Brand Constructors marketing, which includes blog writing Thursday at 8:30am, time to read industry publications, and blocks of time to send thank you cards. Set up smaller items like writing a blog post as a reoccurring event. You can move these around week-to-week, the key here is to block off the time. Once you get your base calendar together, you can add special not reoccurring items. For me, that is writing an article for CFMA this week and preparing materials for SMPS Southern Regional Conference that is in two weeks.

That’s it for the actionable plan. (Make sure you include building the tools you need to achieve your goals.)