How I Plan My Quarterly Marketing Strategy

Can you believe this quarter is ending and the next quarter begins next week? My grandpa used to say that life was like a roll of toilet paper. The closer to the end you get, the faster it goes. I don’t know where he heard it, but it always made me laugh.

Have you planned your quarterly marketing strategy yet? Looking for a plan to follow to create your quarterly marketing strategy? Here’s how I plan my marketing strategy each quarter in 5 easy steps. I hope you find it helpful!

If you want to maximize your time and increase your motivation for planning, join Planner Genius. This program gathers entrepreneurs like yourself together on Zoom for a monthly planning session designed to help you plan out content for the next month. It will keep you focused and productive so you don’t get caught in the weeds and can stay consistent in your marketing.

Step 1: Reflect on how the past quarter went.

Journal exercise

Spend 20-30 minutes journaling on how the last quarter went. What worked and what didn’t? What insights did you gain? Where do you need to set better boundaries? Where do you feel stressed? What made you happy?

Gather your metrics for the last quarter

Before we get into the metrics part, I want to address the elephant in the room when it comes to our mindsets around our metrics. I know many of my clients, and I sometimes attach our self-worth to our business numbers. If our numbers are down, we feel like we’re not doing a good job or we’re not good enough.

Many of my clients have mentioned they feel intimidated because they don’t know where to start or they are scared of what the numbers will say about them.

Your numbers have nothing to do with how good you are at what you do, whether you’re a health coach, home organizer, bookeeper, website designer, or midwife. They are just a way to track your progress and identify what needs to be optimized in your marketing.

Here’s a personal example of how tricky our minds can be around metrics: I had a launch last year in which my sales were dismal. I immediately fell into a “this offer sucks, my marketing sucks, I suck” downward mental spiral.

When I caught myself and realized what I was doing, I decided to investigate what was happening at each step of the funnel. When I actually ran the numbers, my ads looked good, and my sales page was converting well; it was my email deliverability and click-through rates that were low!

I’ve since worked to improve my deliverability and click-through rates, and my most recent launch had 3x the earnings per lead compared to that previous launch. Tracking your numbers will show you what needs fixing.

If you are new to tracking your metrics, start with something easy and small. Jot down what your current audience sizes are on your different social media channels, and your email list.

As you grow, you can choose KPIs (key performance indicators) that are important to your success. Here are some examples of marketing metrics you may want to track depending on your business model and goals:

• Finances: What was your overall revenue? What were your expenses? What was your profit or loss?
• Social: What was your audience growth this month on each of your channels? What were your top 5 posts? Which channels drove the most traffic to your site?
• Leads: Which lead magnet got the most leads? What were your landing page conversion rates? Which traffic channels resulted in the most leads? Which lead magnets converted the most sales?
• Sales: Which products sold best? How many sales calls did you close? How much did you generate in recurring revenue?
• Email: How much did your list grow? How many emails did you send? What were your email open rates, click-through rates, and revenue generated? Which were your top 5 performing emails?
• Funnels: What was your traffic to each page in your funnel? What were your conversion rates on your landing pages, sales pages, order bumps, upsell pages, etc?

Please let me remind you that you don’t have to track all these things all the time!

Is there something in your business that is causing you stress? Is there an area in your business that if it were working better, it would make other areas work better, too? Think about which segment of your business needs the most TLC and start by tracking your metrics.

“What gets measured gets improved.”⏤ Peter Drucker.

Take a peek at the goals you set for the year

Are you on track? What can you do to reach them? Do you need to plan a promotion, finish a funnel, or organize your content strategy?

I like to brainstorm the opportunities and possibilities I have available to me right now. It helps me, especially if I’m not where I want to be as it relates to my yearly goals. This exercise keeps me from living with a scarcity mindset.

Set goals for the next quarter

What are your sales goals for the upcoming quarter? What projects do you want to focus on? What are your marketing goals?

• Do you need to focus on list building? (Yes, keeping a fresh and engaged list is important to every business at any stage!)
• Maybe you need to finish your funnel so you can leverage your time a bit.
• Or is it time to start putting together a new group offer so you can stop spending so much time working with one-on-one clients?

Set your goals and take some time to think through why each goal is important. How will it benefit you when you achieve it? What steps do you need to take to reach it?

Tip: Focus on setting goals around the things you can actually track and have control over. For example, you may not be able to control how many people buy your signature program, but you can track your progress on building your appointment funnel, how many offers you make to your audience, and whether you published a blog, video, or podcast each week this quarter.

Step 2: Identify Your Ideal Client

The clearer you are on who your ideal clients are, the better your messaging, offers, and sales will be.

If you’ve completed your in-depth ideal client research in the past, review your notes and update them with any new insights you have gained about your ideal clients this past quarter. As we work with more clients, our knowledge grows about what they need, what they struggle with, and ways we can help them get results faster and easier.

If it’s been a while since you’ve surveyed your audience, this can be an extremely enlightening exercise. I find it helpful to comb through my clarity call applications for insights and information. I also like to schedule interviews with my ideal clients to get clear on their pains, problems, and frustrations, as well as their goals, dreams, and desires.

Step 3: Review Your Offers

Audit your funnels

Review your sales pages, webinars, video sales letters (VSLs), email nurture sequences, lead magnet, etc. Keep your ideal clients top of mind as you look at your offers. I like to read my sales pages out loud because I can hear what it sounds like and catch where it’s not aligned with my audience.

• Does the content need updating?
• Is it clear who each offer is for and the problem it solves for them?
• Do you clearly state the results or outcomes your product or service promises?
• Is it obvious what they should do next?
• Do any of your offers or marketing assets need updating?
• Does the layout of your sales pages or emails need tweaking for desktop and/or mobile?

I also like to review the analytics on how the pages and emails in my funnel performed in the last quarter (if possible).

• What was the conversion rate on each page?
• Where in the funnel did people start to drop off?
• What can I do to help them get to the next step in the funnel?
• Which emails performed best? Which ones need reworking? Look at your open rates and click-through rates. How can you increase those numbers?

Decide which offer(s) you will be promoting this next quarter

Ideally, I like to have one main offer I am trying to sell and smaller offers (free or paid) you can promote to bring in leads and prepare your ideal clients for the main offer you want to sell.

For example – Here are some possibilities for me.

• Free: Appointment Funnel Blueprint
• Paid: Live Interactive Appointment Funnel Workshop & Content Bundle Order Bump
• Main Offer: Custom Website with an Appointment Funnel

Psst… If you’re really ready to take your business to the next level, you’re looking for the Automagic Business Academy. It has everything you need to grow and scale your business so you can live the life you want to live.

Step 4: Plan your quarterly content calendar

Content is an essential piece in any marketing strategy these days. Creating valuable content consistently means you always have something to nurture your email list, share on social media, drive traffic to your offers, build your authority, and even lower your ad costs!

Grab your marketing planner and brainstorm blog post ideas you’ll publish this month.

Shoot for publishing one piece of quality content per week

This should be a longer form piece of content, like a blog post, podcast, or video.

Think about where your ideal clients go online and which formats of content are the easiest for them to consume. Choose the format that is easy for you to create and the most likely for your ideal clients to consume.

What topics will you talk about?

Think about what your ideal clients need to know, believe, or do to be ready to buy your next offer.

In the case of the Live Appointment Funnel Workshop, in the weeks leading up to the workshop, I could publish content with topics that set the stage for my ideal clients and help them see the value in having an appointment funnel.

• Appointment Funnels 101: How to Get Way More Sales Calls and Grow Your Business with Ease
• How to Find and Attract the Right Clients for Your Business
• 5 Easy Ways to Find Time to Build Your Funnel When You’re Already Overbooked

Do your keyword research for each article. Brainstorm the keyword phrases you’ll want to target.

Include stories to connect with your audience and make your point

Spend some time digging through your mind for stories that you can weave into your content to connect with your audience. Think about your life in general, your own experience with the topic, past clients you’ve worked with, and things that your ideal clients may relate to.

How can you tie a story into a lesson that helps you make a case for your topic?

Here’s an example of what I mean.

A couple of years ago my son asked, out of the blue, if he could get a mullet. I asked him why and he said they were popular.

Now, to give this conversation some context for those of you who live in a metropolitan area, we live in a small town in Wisconsin. Quilted flannels, hunter orange, Packer gear, and camo are what you see people wearing around here. The top brand names are Carhart, Dickies, and Levis, not Chanel, Dior, or Louis Vuitton.

When I mentioned this, he pulled up his phone and started scrolling through photos of celebrities with mullets.

What does this have to do with marketing?

If social proof can make something as awful as the mullet popular again, imagine what it could do for your business!

Weaving stories like this into your content can help build know, like, and trust with your audience and make your content more engaging.

Step 5: Create Your Promotion Strategy

This step is where it all comes together in your quarterly marketing strategy. How are you going to drive traffic to your offers? There are an infinite number of ways to do this but they all fall into three main buckets.

Leverage Your Content to Drive Traffic to Your Offers

Good for you if you’ve created content you can share on social media and send to your email list. This can help you get eyeballs on your offers while positioning you as a trusted authority on your topic.

Repurpose your longer-form content by splintering it into short posts on social media. You can also change the format. For example, if you created video content, you can have it transcribed and turned into a blog post and strip the audio to turn into a podcast.

Blogs, videos, and podcasts can also generate free traffic from search engines and platform-specific search (like YouTube or Apple Podcasts) if you’ve optimized your content well.

Leverage Your Connections

• Have you done the work to build social equity with a community of people, like a Facebook group, either yours or one you belong to (be sure to get permission before sharing)?
• Maybe you’ve been generous about sharing other people’s content that’s relevant to your audience, and you’ve created some goodwill with your audience.
• Maybe you’ve built relationships with other business owners who share your audience but are not in direct competition with you.

If so, you’re in a good position to generate traffic to your offers by leveraging those social connections! Think joint ventures, being a guest on someone’s podcast, asking for people to share your post, or even partnering up to present your webinar to someone’s group coaching clients!

Leverage Your Cash

Paid ads can give you the most leverage on your time if you have planned for it in your budget. My ads work best when I take a layered approach:

1. Use ads to drive traffic to the blog posts, videos, or podcasts that get the most traffic, engagement, or shares on social media.
2. Promote my lead magnet to grow my list.
3. Promote my paid offers to get more sales and/or discovery calls booked.

I recommend you have a solid funnel and email marketing follow-up in place before doing your paid ads so you’re squeezing as much potential as you can out of every dollar you spend on ads.

If you are looking to hire someone to help you launch a website, funnel, and email follow-up campaign, schedule a clarity call with me. I’m happy to show you the ways we can work together and answer your questions!

That’s my 5-step process for planning my quarterly marketing strategy. I hope you enjoyed it and will take some of the tips I shared and work them into your own planning process!

Finally, if you’d want to have more of your dream clients booking discovery calls, book a clarity call and let’s see if an appointment funnel makes sense for your business!