Are you marketing with intent or by accident? Choose intent.

By MARK RIFFEY for the Flathead Beacon

Are you marketing with intent or by accident? The only thing those two have in common is “ent”. Choose intent.

It’s a massive job?

Like anything you might not have done before, a marketing calendar might seem like a massive job. Don’t let that freeze you.

Big jobs have a way of creating a resistance to getting started – you’re frozen. Big tasks that you feel like you can’t finish in one setting are easy to put off. Next thing you know, it’s next January and you still haven’t gotten started. You can do this a year, quarter or a month at a time, so break it down. If a month seems like too much to bite off at once, start with a week. In fact, start with next week. What will you do with intent next week. The important thing is to start.

If you can’t dedicate an afternoon to it, then start 30 or even 15 minutes at a time. Once you get rolling with a week, look at that first week and figure out what should happen the second week after doing what’s planned for the first week.

Anyone can do a week at a time or take one intentional marketing effort at a time. No matter how slow it goes, get moving and keep moving. Create some marketing momentum.

Beating the blank page

Writing sometimes starts with that first, incredibly tough blank page. Building a marketing calendar isn’t much different. It starts with that first blank month. So where do you start?

What marketing efforts would you make this year even if you were the most disorganized accidental marketer ever? Put that on your calendar.

How do most of your new clients learn about you? Are they walk-ins or drive-bys? Do they find you online? Are they referred? Do they respond to ads in <something>? Rather than doing things to attract these clients accidentally – put the number one client attraction technique / effort on your calendar.

Once you have even one thing on your calendar, it’s easy to move ahead and identify other things you already do. The marketing calendar is your road map to doing these things with intent, doing them with enough lead time that you aren’t tempted to blow them off and getting them executed consistently.

Keep it simple

A marketing calendar might seem like a thing that should be complex, hard to understand and a hassle to implement. While a calendar can have lots of components and it can be multi-layered, it doesn’t have to complicated or a hassle. Focus on one piece at a time and keep things simple until you’re ready to step things up a level.

For example, you might have seen a multiple media, integrated campaign that coordinates email, social media, direct mail, radio, TV and who knows what else – and does so in a sequence over time. It might be tempting to think that if you can’t do that, you shouldn’t bother building a marketing calendar. Don’t use that as an escape hatch. You might get to the point where anything less than that seems like you aren’t even trying. Don’t let that happen. Keep it simple until you get some momentum from executing your calendar and creating something intentionally.

The first goal of a marketing calendar is to start marketing with intent: to work a plan, and stop marketing by accident. Once you have the mechanics in place, you can add additional layers, media and sequences as it makes sense, if it makes sense.

The end game isn’t the end.

What’s all of this for?

We started this discussion by asking if you market with intent or by accident. The goal of this process is to eventually get you to the point where you know what has to be executed each day in order to do the marketing you know you need to do. Intent.

Why’s that important?

When marketing is done consistently and with intent, it creates the conditions that allow you to know exactly what to do to keep growing your business. It creates job security for your people, who will most certainly detect the results of marketing with intent. It will build confidence in you and in the business.

When you work under conditions where you no longer worry about your job or whether your paycheck will clear this week, I think you’ll do better work. That’s good for everyone.

Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a strategic, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site, contact him on Twitter, or email him at mriffey@flatheadbeacon.com.