One of the questions often asked is how to plan your weekly marketing tasks to benefit from the power of momentum. A key to momentum and marketing success is breaking down your goals into bite-size chunks and making time to do them consistently. This may seem like stating the obvious and overly simplistic, but it does work like magic.
Journal Your Goals
It is possible to waste an inordinate amount of time focusing on the wrong tasks and not achieving your goals. Either at the end of the week or Sunday evening, review your weekly achievements and plan your marketing goals for the next week in advance. Once you have your goals determined you can build your schedule from there. This has the benefit of being fresh in your mind and assists you in finding solutions quicker to challenges. Ask yourself the following questions weekly:
- Lessons learnt – what opportunities are there for improvement (review analytics).
- Wins – what worked well, feel free to celebrate your small victories.
Set Your Weekly Targets
Ask yourself what will make this week a win for me? What are your top 3 marketing targets for this week? For example, it may be an email campaign to get 30 people to attend an up and coming exhibition or generate new followers on your core social media platforms (building your prospect and sales opportunities).
Create your Schedule
Your schedule will vary from week to week. I recommend that you work in blocks as it is easier to focus on specific areas. Generally, you will have 2-3 highly productive chunks in a day, including any meetings. Once you have blocked out your artwork creation time, you can then plan the rest of your day to cover core marketing and business activities.
As you can see there is a weekly time dedicated to key marketing tasks such as content writing, social media, PR, email, database management. I have also added 2 hours weekly for admin and shipping.
I always leave a block at the end of the day for 30 minutes to deal with emergent tasks. This shouldn’t be used for planned tasks and should be kept free for new or urgent items.
Be Flexible
Remember if you are planning effectively, you can be adaptable so you can respond to your highest priority. By creating a top-level weekly plan, you can be rest assured that there is more than enough time to achieve your goals.
By Shirley-Ann O’Neill