LOCAL MARKET MONOPOLY EPISODE 28
Yearly Marketing Strategy Planning
Podcast by Clarence Fisher
Yearly Marketing Strategy Planning

About This Episode

We may all be ready to say good-bye to 2020, but is your business ready for the new year?

In this episode, Clarence discusses the importance of yearly marketing strategy planning for your small business and how to get it right for 2021. He offers tips for making the most of your marketing plan to get results and grow your business. Learn how to overcome roadblocks, avoid pitfalls, leverage the right marketing strategies, and take action.

Don’t begin the new year without a solid marketing plan in place. Listen to this episode now to get your business on the path to a successful 2021!

Disclaimer: The transcription below is provided for your convenience. Please excuse any mistakes that the automated service made in translation.

Clarence Fisher: Welcome back to Local Market Monopoly. My name is Clarence Fisher. I am your host. And today this week, we're talking about yearly strategy planning. I know it sounds kind of boring, but I'm going to try to jazz it up a little bit for you. I don't know. It may still be boring, but you have to stay tuned to find out. This is what I'm going to share with you this week, four different strategies that you can use to get more customers, clients, or patients in the coming year. Also, we're going to talk about how to decide which strategy is going to be your primary strategy, to get more people to know about you next year than you did this year, and then we're also going to walk through, you know, what promotions you're going to run, how you're going to run them so that you know, kind of how money's going to flow to your business the next year, all throughout the year. Okay. That's all coming up so tight the earbuds. Let's go.

Intro: You're listening to Local Market Monopoly with Clarence Fisher, uncovering the tools tactics, and strategies. The most successful small businesses use in their local market and own the block.

Clarence Fisher: Thank you for holding on during those few seconds there. If you hear any kind of crazy strange noises, it's not because it's a Halloween hangover. It is there's a skyscraper being built next door, not necessarily, but it sounds like it. So let's get to it. Shall we? As you know, this week, as every week, we give you a chance to get coaching specifically for your business about marketing strategy, offers, sales, whatever you need. All you have to do is go to Clarencefisher.com/ask. And we're going to ask you one question. What's the single biggest question you have about marketing your local business online. You're going to be given an opportunity to leave a 90-second audio explanation of your question, and I will get that answered about your specific business. So go to Clarencefisher.com/ask and I'll provide answers to your burning questions as you're sitting there listening.

Clarence Fisher: All right. So now on to the meat and potatoes, as we say in Oklahoma here, and we're talking about yearly strategy planning, I'm actually a planner. If you have not noticed, I'm a planner and I'm one of the few people in the world that get excited about blocking out time in the calendar to do nothing but pace around, drink coffee get about what eight-foot, eight-foot-wide board that I'm looking at here in the office and all kinds of scribbles. And I love what Frank Kern calls scheming. I love doing it. So, uh, you may not, but this is going to be quick and easy. Okay, you can do this. You can get your team together, probably the executive team, maybe, you know, uh, your, your marketing manager, for sure with you. But the first thing we want to do and looking at the next year is to decide what strategy we're going to use to tell you a quick story.

Clarence Fisher: Back when I very first got started in marketing, Google Adwords was the thing to do. I mean, there was so much money being made in Google Adwords. Well, we put 100% of all budget on Google Adwords, right? Put it all on black, all of it. And you can guess what happened. Eventually, Google changed its rules and the big infamous Google slap happened, where you had businesses that were doing millions of dollars in business, all of a sudden doing zero because the rules change just like that. And if you're all on one medium we are subject to their rules we always are, but it was our fault. We're putting everything on that. And so, not even been thinking the same thing happened again with Facebook now, years later.

Clarence Fisher: So finally I'm sitting here and I'm like, you know what? This is not good. W get used them, to the camera. I say it is, we get used to the milk. We get used to the gold, the golden eggs, right? So what are we going to do while I sat back in despair? And I thought we have to kind of spread this out. Oh yeah, spread this out. Why don't we do, why don't we do that? Let's have a, so we started creating this marketing, what we call marketing systems based on the R4 framework of reputation, reach, repeat sales, and referrals. There's a fifth R if you really want to call retargeting or fifth R, but you kind of retarget everything, but reputation raises repeat sales and referrals. That's the OG for marketing systems and the strategies that you need to put in place.

Clarence Fisher: And when we started thinking in those terms, instead of saying, we are we going to use AdWords or are we going to use Facebook or are we going to put our money in SEO. We kind of switched it and started thinking, where do we need to concentrate on within these four different systems? Okay. So we look at our reputation and this is one of the things you're going to want to do, grab a piece of paper. And we're gonna, we're gonna write down reputation, reach, repeat sales and referrals. Make a little, a little list right there. I'm trying to find my list. There we go. Make a little less right there. Reputation number 2 reach. Number three, repeat sales, number four referrals. Okay. Now let's look at the reputation and let's just, self-evaluate self-evaluate, uh, self evaluate yourself. That's yeah.

Clarence Fisher: What that means. So on your reputation, right? Controlling, which is an illusion, kind of. What others see and say about your business online. Let's take that word controlling. Let's say influencing. You want to influence what others see and say about you and your business online. How effective are you right now at that on a scale from one to 10, how effective do you feel like you are, or your business is at that? Do you have a review system in place? Okay. We know that the reputation of the base of everything now. Okay. So now let's look at reach. A lot of people will make the mistake of going after reach first without looking at the reputation, but let's go after reach and on reach, rate yourself one to 10, how effective you are at making sure people, more people know about you today than did yesterday.

Clarence Fisher: Every day, more people know about you today than did yesterday. How effective are you? That's your Adwords. You're what we typically think about as, like digital marketing. Okay. Your Adwords, YouTube, SEO, stuff like that. How are you doing? Okay. Now let's go down to repeat sales. Some people say resale, repeat sales, getting more customers, clients, or patients to buy more from you more often. How rate yourself one to 10, how are you doing with that? Getting customers, clients, or patients to buy more from you more often, where are we at? And then finally, let's look at your referrals. Now we know it is so ironic that in small business, most business actually gets to you by referrals, right? Yep. I see you nodding. Most of us get business by referrals yet very few of us have a referral system or clear strategy to get referrals.

Clarence Fisher: We just kinda say they're going to happen. So in terms of systematically asking for referrals from every single customer, client, or patient, getting referrals, raise your, not yourself. I'm not going to say to you. Rate your business one to 10. Okay. Now let's look at that. Let's look at it, tally it up. I wish I had some tally mood music. I need to get one of those keyboards that sit right here. Actually, I have one it's just not hooked up. So, note to self, complete studio transformation. All right. So, tally it all up. And where do you feel like you need now? You're going to have two different thoughts on this. And I know it is because we're all leaders. And especially when you look at strengths training or whatever, you're going to look at this and you say, Hey, we are not doing good at all on reach.

Clarence Fisher: We have a two on reach. I was helping, like, don't say you have a two or a one on reputation. If that is the case. If that is the case that I'm just going to say right now, that's what you have to work on, okay? If that's the case in reputation, but let's look at reach and say, Hey, you have a two on outreach, but you have an eight on repeat sales. Well, you know, most people would say, some people will say, hey, we're going to just double down on the repeat sales, were not got to work on what we're not good at, but you can't really do that with this. Okay? So look at where you need to improve and let's focus on that, at least for the first quarter. Okay? You can break these up into quarters anyway.

Clarence Fisher: So say, you need to work on your reputation for January, February, March, and then you can jump on to, locking in a system to bring more people to you on Q2 and Q3 and then Q4. Okay? So that is the first part that is like, what do we need to concentrate on? Get the whole team around it. Or we got to, we need to grow our reputation. And we are going to be known as the number one authority in the market for what we offer the theme of the year? Is the theme just make sure everybody in our city knows who we are. Is it to get more referrals? Is it to get more repeat sales? What's the theme. Okay. So you've got that. Now, let us move, move on to your promotion calendar for the year.

Clarence Fisher: Okay. Those are the strategy for this is pick number one, pick which one of those four you need to concentrate on. And now we're going to jump into something that is, uh, you may think it's like totally different, but it ties in. It's your promotional calendar. Yes. The calendar I'm gonna tell you. Most people have no, most businesses have no promotional calendar. It's a last-minute thing that they're thinking, hey, let's send out a promotion of this month about I don't know, Veteran's Day. Veteran's Day is today and we had that promotion set probably, I don't know, three weeks ago, but it's on our promotional calendar. We've done that three years in a row. And this is what I want for you is to look at, first of all, write down all of the services that you offer, every single service you offer.

Clarence Fisher: And some of you may just be one service, one-trick pony. That's fine. That's great. But every service you offer, write it down. And then what we're going to do is take out our calendar. We use Google calendar, you can use, or you can use any calendar and go ahead and choose the holidays that you're going to make sure that you promote. You want to promote for the holidays. Everybody can have a holiday, find holidays to promote. You want to mark those holidays and then start coming up with some ideas that you can connect your service to. Okay? And then after you do the holidays include any seasonal events. Actually, I would do the seasonal events first. Write down any seasonal events that you have for your business. Maybe you support a certain charity at some time in a year, maybe you have a drive or maybe you have a promotion of your own that you do every single year, put those in there, and then do your holidays. Okay?

Clarence Fisher: And here's the key that I don't see a lot of businesses do. And a big shout out to digital marketer on this. We started using this strategy several years ago and it's writing down the revenue that you need every single month in order to hit your yearly target. So you have a revenue target for the entire year, right? And so a breakdown every month, the revenue that you need to make in order to hit that revenue target. And then what you do is you tie in your promotions for that month to hit that revenue. So, you know, if you've got, I don't know if you got 60,000, a hundred thousand, 200,000, we'll say a hundred thousand, you have a hundred thousand dollars coming in for January, but you need 150,000 to come in order to hit your goal by the year.

Clarence Fisher: So what needs to happen is the promotions that you run in January need to generate $50,000. Okay? So whatever your team needs to come at it from that angle and say, all right, so what is happening in January that we can tie into that we can use to promote to make this $50,000 difference. So now we're looking at the new year's party or, or, getting your year started right. How can you tie your business into that? What kind of theme can you have for January where you can get people on board and make that difference? So now all of a sudden Valentine's day becomes something. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you're a staffing agency. It doesn't matter if you're a restaurant, restaurants are for sure. It just doesn't matter what kind of, what kind of business you have. You can create themes that will help you hit that revenue.

Clarence Fisher: But the key is to think about it ahead of time. Now it's a lot of hard work. I'm not gonna sugar coat. That is a lot of hard thinking. A lot of companies will take that two-day retreat, that one day retreat, and make this happen. But once it's done, you're really repeating this every year. So you're sitting down before the year starts and you're thinking about, okay, let's reassess ourselves on these four systems, which one do we need to work on? Let's get that clear. Number one, we need to work on our reputation or reach or repeat sales or referrals, which one are we working on? So decide on that, then pull out your promo calendar, which is going to be the same after you've done this, you've done the hard work for 12 months, right?

Clarence Fisher: Uh, it's pretty much gonna be the same promotion unless something fails. That's something really tanked. If it tanked take it out of the calendar. If you run across an idea that you want to try, say last year we ran across an idea that maybe a competitor was doing, put that on our calendar. We're going to do that next year, right? So the point being is that there's not really any surprises, so you can increase revenue year by year. And these promotions get even more and more impactful for you. okay? So those are the steps. Once you have that calendar, make sure that you share with your marketing person, make sure you share with everybody that has anything to do with it. If you've got staff, writing, blog posts, if you've got, if you've got writers, writing blog posts, everybody needs to, it needs to be able to see that calendar and know what's going on.

Clarence Fisher: So that's it, okay? Figure out which of the four systems you need to be working on, evaluate yourself there, get your calendar, look at the year, what are we going to do? If we need to get more reach? Let's look at Adwords or Facebook or where are people are and how we're going to do that. But first, you want to get those promotions locked in and you want to tie it to revenue. That's the key, tie it to revenue. I know I'm speaking to the choir. Yeah. You're like, yeah. Yeah. It needs to be tied to revenue because that's what I've been trying to tell them for sure. All right. Why don't you, if you like what you heard today, share it and, leave us a review on Apple, Stitcher, wherever you listen to your podcasts and media, please, and a tag at Local Market Monopoly, #owntheblock and I'm looking forward to hearing from you. How is this, how does this go for you? Is it like super, you know it's going to be intensive and probably boring, but just get donuts or something and do it? It's the only way you're going to own the block. I'll see you next week.

: We appreciate you listening to Local Market Monopoly. Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show and visit ClarenceFisher.com for more resources that will help you dominate your local market and own the block.

Resources

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Episode 29: The Business Impact of Giving