Fitness Business School – Say NO to Annual Marketing Calendars

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here. And I want to talk with you about annual marketing calendars and what I consider the truth about marketing calendars got a lot to unpack in this episode. So let’s get to it.

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You know, every year towards the end of the year, when we’re doing our annual planning, I get request from both clients and just, you know, subscribers on the email list or people on social media asking about annual marketing calendars. They want to have this, the, this precise plan of what they’re gonna be doing for the next 365 days. And they want it all scripted out and choreographed to you know, build the year that they want. And, and I get it because it gives you a little bit of peace of mind saying, Hey, if I have this marketing calendar, I’ve got the answers. I can kind of just go on autopilot. But unfortunately, you know, I’ve been doing, this are like 17 years, 18 years at this point. And I have never seen anybody run through an annual marketing calendar and I actually go as planned because there, there are a few things that, that, that happen along the way.

The first is we get better information. Ideally, you’re going to be smarter, more knowledgeable, wiser about your market, better equipped to know what’s working right now in the marketing landscape. What’s working, what what’s working for you. You’re gonna be better at all this stuff three months from now, six months from now, nine months from now. And if you’re not, that’s probably not a good thing, right? Like if we’re not improving, if we’re not equipping ourselves with better information, then a marketing, calendar’s not gonna save us because the market, the landscape, the, the chain animals that you use, the competition, it all changes. It evolves. So if we marry ourself to something on January 1st that we plan on doing on October 15th, well, you know, you are, you are using information. That’s 10 months old to, to compete in a landscape that’s using real time information. It’s not a great plan for success.

The second thing that, that I think we all recognize is the, the, the world is in a state of continual evolution. Imagine you had the best marketing plan on the planet, the best marketing calendar you could possibly design on January 1st, 2020, how would that have been serving you in April? How would that have been helping you then? So, you know, we, we have to be a realist about the fact that things are kind of constantly changing. I mean, there have been various points during the last year or so that it look like, Hey man, we’re coming out of this.

People are getting comfortable going back into the gym. Everybody’s excited. And then, you know, I, I catch word from people in various markets, a around the world. And that’s kind of one of the cool things about my job is we’ve got clients everywhere from, you know, Australia to Akron, Ohio, and people are, you know, some people are going back into lockdown. Some people, you know, the, the market they’re in, hasn’t been more restrictive. So, you know, it is in a constant state of flux and we have to be adaptable. In fact, when I look at our clients during the, the kind of peak of the pandemic that, that 2020 you know, March to, to January or March to December, and then early January, February, March of 2021, we had one clock client close, and they were somebody who couldn’t adapt because they were part of a franchise organization that would not allow them to evolve and adapt to the things that we were doing. And I, I think that we have to see as independent business owners, that adaptability is a huge asset, a huge strength of ours.

So the that’s the second kind of, I think bottleneck. And then the third is simple. You know, one of the, the hallmarks of our coaching and one of the most important things that, that have, has helped me throughout my professional life is planning. I plan every day, the evening before I plan every week over the weekend preceding it. And we focus in our coaching program on winning the week, winning the day we, we, we sit down and work on, okay, what are you gonna do with con to connect with new leads? What are you gonna do to convert those leads into clients? What are you gonna do with your current clients? We work on that every week. And then we have a planning call every Tuesday, where we coach people on how to plan their day, how to make sure that they’re using their time to get the results personally and professionally that they want.

And it’s that important. But it’s amazing. When I talk to people that are struggling, they aren’t planning. They aren’t planning their day or their week, but then they’re worried about planning their year. It makes no sense, right? We have to own the time in front of us. We have to win the moment, win the day. And if we do that with some general vision to guide us those guardrails, to make sure we’re all, all moving in that direction, we want to go, we’re gonna be in great shape. So when it comes to your annual marketing calendar, my recommendation is this, look at the important dates on the calendar over the course of the year that you’re going to be doing bigger events, right? I mean, I can look ahead and tell you when my kids summer breaks, spring breaks, holidays, all that stuff. I can look at that and I can plot that in and I can adjust accordingly. If you’re gonna run a challenge in the fall, if you’re gonna run a challenge in the spring, put the day on the calendar, and then back out two to three weeks and identify the dates that you’re gonna stretch your marketing.

But aside from that, we don’t need to color in all those boxes. We don’t need to plan all the nuances of the marketing that far out it any more than that, we don’t need to know what our newsletters are gonna say, or our social posts are gonna say in August, we don’t need to know if we’re gonna run a, bring a friend day in November. What we need to know is the stuff that’s take some pre up, take some lead up that we need to work around. We need to have that design and scheduled well in advance. We need to know when our team is going to take time off. If they’re going on vacation, we need to know if we are going on vacation. We need to have that in the calendar so we can accommodate. So you need to be looking more at your life annual calendar and building around that than some specific marketing calendar, because honestly, 90% of your results are going to live in planning your week and planning your day. Sure that you’re using the time in front of you wisely. And if you do that, you stack up, you know, not, you don’t have to win 52 weeks every year, but if you were to go out and win 30 or 40 weeks, where man, I, I was efficient and effective. And I moved towards my goals. If you went out there and, and did that, you won a couple hundred days during the course of the year, you’re gonna see your business grow. You’re gonna see your profit grow. You’re gonna see your professional ailment and happiness grow. So when we’re talking about building out your marketing calendar, focus on winning the week, focus on winning the day, do that. And the annual stuff will largely Take care of itself.

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