In my last post, I posted a short video I did talking about the importance and power of creating a 12 month marketing calendar.  I wanted to spend one more day talking about this powerful tool for growing your lawn care or landscaping business.

One of the reasons a 12 month marketing calendar is such a powerful tool is because of the vision it gives you.  Just as you would never set off on a cross country journey without first consulting a road atlas, it would be as equally foolish to think you could grow your business by any amount without a clear cut plan to make it happen.

By carefully outlining a step-by-step plan, complete with scheduled action items, you give yourself the direction you need to carry out your plan.  Without these action items, it’s easy for life to ‘get in the way’.  

As I mentioned in the video, there are 3 key ideas you keep in mind as you go through this process:

1.      Do something each and every month.  Doing this helps you get in a marketing mindset and it helps create name recognition with your chosen market.

2.      Create a theme for each month.  One of the biggest sins in marketing is being boring and you can avoid this blunder by picking a theme for each month’s campaign.

3.      Target your efforts at prospects, customers, and joint venture partners.  If you’ll do something each month for each of these groups, you’ll soon have a pipeline absolutely loaded with new business and your business will be on the up and up.

So, if you want a full proof tool for taking your business to the next level and beyond, take a few minutes over the next day or so to create your own 12 month marketing calendar.  If you’ll do this, I can almost guarantee your business will make significant strides in 2008.

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Before the week ended, I wanted to send you a quick note to give you some things to think about with respect to your marketing.

You don’t need me to tell you this, but 2008 is barreling towards us like a runaway freight train on crack.  It’ll be here before any of us know it and if we’re not prepared, we’ll be behind the eight ball.

In order to make sure this doesn’t happen, you want to have a solid marketing plan in place.  Part of this plan should be a step-by-step action plan for the specific marketing steps you’ll be taking throughout the year. 

I’m actually in the process of putting together my plan for 2008 and one of the things I do is to print out a 12 month calendar.  I then go through each month and plan very specific marketing activities, complete with action items and due dates. 

For these action items I write down what exactly it is, whether it’s a sales letter, postcard, or email.  I also write out some quick ideas for a headline and offer to make things easier once I actually get to that specific action item.

Finally, as the year begins, I’ll pull out that calendar at the beginning of each and every month and look over the next 3-4 months to see what action items are coming down the pipeline.  Then at the beginning of each week, I’ll look over the next month and go into greater detail with the upcoming action items as I plan my weekly/daily activities.

Doing this helps me stay on plan and on target for reaching my yearly goals.  Thanks to this calendar, I don’t have to wonder what to do next.  I already know EXACTLY what needs to be done.

So, as you begin looking forward to next think, I encourage you to give some serious thought to creating your own marketing calendar.  Don’t leave your business growth to chance.  If you DON’T put some effort into planning for how you’re going to grow your business, chances are you’ll look back one year from now and realize you’re in pretty much the same spot.

If you’d like some help putting together a comprehensive marketing plan for next year, you’re welcome to join the Champion’s Circle tele-seminar scheduled for this upcoming Wednesday.  We’ll be talking about the specific steps necessary to create a detailed, step-by-step marketing plan for 2008.

You can get all the details about everything the Champion’s Circle has to offer right here:

www.LawnCareChampionsCircle.com

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