As a business owner, you are well-aware that the best-laid plans often go off course. However, planning or mapping out your direction is essential to a strategic and successful marketing plan.
This month, as my clients ride the tide of retail madness (hello Santa!), we’re also making time for our yearly planning sessions.
While it might take time to do at odd hours of the night, these jewelers, designers and diamond dealers understand it’s probably the most important action item they can cross off their list right now.
Taking the time to assess what went well over the last 365 days, what needs improvement, and what needs to happen in the year ahead is paramount to the progression of your business and your long-term goals.
Here are my tips on how to put together a plan with panache.
1. Conduct a Thorough Annual Review
Before you can figure out where you’re headed, you first need to understand where you’ve been.
What was your most successful month this year? Why?
What month brings back bad memories? What happened?
Did you have any trunk shows? Conferences? Events? Promotions? What seemed to resonate with your audience? What fell flat?
Taking the time to go through each month of the year, analyzing the numbers and the corresponding strategies is essential for you to tie up any loose ends and create opportunities for improvement in the year ahead.
2. Set Your Goals
Many creatives seem to run away from Excel spreadsheets, but I want you to embrace the numbers and consider them your new best friend.
Simple is best; I’m enclosing an image (below) for all you visual folk.
In Column A, list each month (January-December). In Column B, you are going to put down your sales goal for the month.
For example, now that you’ve done a review for 2019, you see that you sold $20,000 in January 2019. You’ve decided you’re going to sell $30,000 in January 2020.
Column C is your weekly goal. Assuming there are four weeks in each year, divide $30,000 by four and arrive at a weekly goal of $7,500.
This is where I have my clients visualize what $7,500 actually looks like. Do you sell engagement rings? Perhaps, on average, an engagement ring is around $7,500. That means during the month of January, you want to sell approximately one engagement ring a week and a few other pieces.
By taking the numbers and putting them in terms of tangible products or services you offer, it helps you start to visualize your success. It allows you to say, “Oh yes, I can achieve this goal!”
If you can’t say that with 100 percent confidence, scale back your goals to match. You are the driver of this ship and in order to manifest your desires, you need to believe them.
3. Develop Intention I’ve talked about this briefly in other articles, but I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to set intentions around your business objectives.
You have your numbers in place, but how realistically are you going to achieve that $30,000? That is where smart marketing comes into play.
You are going to set an intention for each month of the year.
For example, in January, you are going to set the intention of “refresh.” It makes sense, right? Everyone starts the year with new hopes and dreams, and tons of resolutions.
But, how do you tie “refresh” back into your business?
Well, if you are a fine jewelry designer, you love a good estate jewelry refresh. It’s what we call a modern heirloom. This month, you are going to highlight all the ways in which we can refresh old pieces with a new modern aesthetic. Brilliant!
4. Using Intention to Guide Your Marketing Initiatives Now that you’ve set your monthly intention, it’s time to flesh out the rest of your initiatives for the month.
We’re still in our Excel spreadsheet, but this time we’ve created a separate tab just for January. I usually put the sales goal ($30,000) and the intention (Refresh) at the top of the page. Then I start creating my calendar.
What days of the month will I write a blog? What days of the month will I send out an email? When will my monthly newsletter go out? Am I offering any promotions or discounts to support this collateral?
For example, the week of Monday, Jan. 6 I’ve decided to write a blog about my custom design process that I send out on Tuesday, Jan. 7.
I’ve also decided to offer a promotion this month for a free consultation and send out an email on Wednesday, Jan. 8 that showcases the blog and talks about my promotion—bring in all your old family pieces for a half-hour of my time to brainstorm designs!
Best yet, I am going to ensure my social media for this week matches these initiatives. I’ll post “before” and “after” images of pieces I’ve done, I’ll offer a snapshot of my grandmother’s jewelry box from the 1920s, I’ll post designs that are modern takes on classic styles.
I’m not asking you to create all this content right now; I’m just asking you to create prompts for yourself and set dates.
This way, when you’re feeling flustered and off-track, you simply open up your trusty annual marketing calendar and see what goals you had laid out for yourself. Just pick up where you left off.
Jacqueline Stoneis a recovering jewelry designer who now works in marketing and runs her own e-commerce site, TotemsandTarot.com.
