Publish or Perish
Successful marketing requires that you produce and distribute relevant content on a regular basis.

That’s why Step 3: “Adopt The Publishing Model” is so important to honor and practice.

Of course, once you embrace this reality, using a marketing calendar becomes an inescapable conclusion.

Lead Generation
At the same time, you’ll be engaging in many different activities to market your business.

In Step 5, “Orchestrate The Lead-Generation Trio” you’ll be focusing on advertising, PR and referrals.  These marketing activities are not ‘one-off’ activities.  They are most effective when you engage in a series of actions.

For example, an advertising campaign requires that you plan your creative message, select appropriate media, monitor results and modify your campaign accordingly.

Public Relations involves identifying and cultivating media contacts with useful information on a regular basis.

Generating referrals requires a systematic approach and carefully coordinated actions to produce successful results.

Managing Your Web Presence
In Step 3: “Create a Total Web Presence” you’re managing your social media profiles — definitely not a ‘one and done’ kind of activity!  Creating and using a ‘listening post’ to monitor your brand’s mentions involves a number of orchestrated actions.  And let’s not forget the ‘big driver’ of your content is your blog — which requires definite planning to maintain a quality level that will generate traffic to your site.

Marketing is a NEVER-ending function of your business
Once you begin to implement your marketing, you quickly realize that consistency in your actions, over time, is best managed by creating a marketing calendar. The annual marketing calendar is not only a great planning device for campaigns and product launches, it’s also a great tool to organize and schedule all your time-sensitive projects and actions.

Creating projects and breaking them down into daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly actions, helps you maintain focus on your marketing and the results you’re seeking from doing your marketing . . . by design, not accident and consistently and conscientiously rather than sporadically, erratically and ineffectively.

KEY POINT:
Ask, “What would happen if I started to manage my marketing ‘by the calendar’?”
Trust me, you’ll like the answer!