Lessons

Lesson Info

Creating a Working Calendar

all right so let's jump right back in we just covered social media so now we're gonna shift gears were still in the marketing mode and we're gonna talk about the marketing calendar now most of you in this room are already as few members so you know that this is my uh the platform for what I teach is really creating comprehensive marketing and creating organization when it comes to marketing calendar my original calendar came out of frustration out of for marketing and uh when marketing is managing you in other words you doing emergency marketing you're out of money and you're trying to do things this is where I had to find a system something that would allow me to control when I marketed how I marketed and I had to understand all the variables to and that's and that's where this came from so when you're creating calendar you want to create something that's very clean and clear and consistent it also has to be very accessible it has to be something that you could be sitting in you know ...

a store and go oh my gosh had this idea and type it in really quickly so whether it's your phone or your computer I'm always big about I take notes on my phone and then I transfer them to my computer and then I try to implement a cz uh best is I can once you've got a working calendar then you're gonna turn it into a system now there are lots of ways that you can create your own calendar on dh we're gonna kind of go through that as well now there are all kinds of types of marketing there's what we call continuous marketing those are things that you do every single month baby plan that we talked last time is a good example of that there are also specials typically a specialist something you're doing to instigate more marketing so that might be like the model searches that we have coming up on dh then of course we talked about emergency marketing and how we try to avoid that when your emergency marketing it means you're going to give something away at a low price because you're desperate and it comes through and not only your campaign but almost always it does not bring the fruition that you need because you're doing a low end products you're going for a low and target and you're going to get a low end result and that just doesn't usually work so you have to be very be careful with emergency marketing my goal for all of you is to never have to go down that route emergency marketing tends to come when session counter lo really bad economies definitely affect that as well the system that we use we use a color code system and I think I brought grab calendar real quick it's in here somewhere we go have some visual aids here um wears a color code system now this is the way that I teach doing this we talked in belize and babies we covered the calendar so I really have to breathe through this really quickly but I want to kind of show you how if you are going to do this on your own you're gonna actually be able to implement this now the way I recommend is to buy yourself a big calendar like this something that I always buy really big you know it's it's huge it's like body size but I need lots of room to write things in here we use color code system we use three different colors as you can see blue represents the design phase orange represents the press phase and then red represents the send out face now the way I teach us and the reason it's easier to do it on a paper calendar to start and then transferred to a digital calendar is what we're gonna do is we're gonna create a marketing campaign and then we're gonna go through the process of going backwards to set up the campaign so we always go we start with the end result which will be the session and work our way backwards in order to make a marketing calendar you have to understand your marketing structure who are your marketing too the color codes help us stay on track and we're gonna help you develop a system that works so this calendar that you're looking at here is actually the university counter this is sandy puts university that's what the whole thing is about is all of those campaigns you're looking at we pre create him for our students they just download them and they're able to send them out very low effort but what I wanted to do is to physically since we did this last time I want to do something little different show you how I built the original calendar because the first time I did not did this I did it for myself only there was no sandy puts university this was sandy pitches drowning so we're gonna save her and that's kind of where this calendar came from we sat we took the entire staff and we had a staff meeting and we started to address what are problems were and the number one problem was marketing we're good marketers but we were very much emergency marketers I am an idea person so it was always like this idea let's hurry to do this and I need them tomorrow and I want to get it out I was causing my staff to have heart attacks because to me let's just get it done I forget that I'm disrupting their whole entire workflow and taking them away from what they should be doing to do my little idea or my emergency effort and whether you have staff or not I think even especially think don't have staff you tend to be this whole I got to do this I gotta do this I got to do this and I have this idea most entrepreneurs are idea people so seems to get an idea you want to do it right now you see a speaker and they have a collide and you want to go right now and that's where you start to get lost in sort of the depth of marketing so first time we did this we sat down in addressed our problems first marketing was one of our biggest problem consistency on our calendar so we sat down and we bought a very big version of this calendar and we started figuring out a theory of how to handle this now the first thing we did is we wrote every session that we had so this is kind of the steps I want you to take if we were gonna do a ballet campaign we'd figure out what day do we want to do that campaign and we marked it on the calendar if we're gonna do a christmas campaign we've filled the entire calendar full of every campaign that we wanted to do the color that we chose to write down that session was red so red is the final stage and it meant this is the day we're going to do that session or around the day that we're gonna actually have those sessions being photographed once we had that day on there we started working backwards we work in a four month cycle this is how we teach marketing is start with your session and work your way backwards so going back um from the dot from the day that you would want to do the session we would go back four weeks and that would be the day that we would want to send things to clients so of course in red we would write let's just say that victor I kind of walked through it on sq calendar let's say we're going to a school well portrait session later on I'm going to teach you this campaign and show you why it could be a good benefit to your business but let's say you wanted to do your campaign you wanted to shoot it december let's see let's see you want a simmer wanna make sure it's right november december january february march so march you're gonna be photographing the school portrait campaign which is right about when we do it in our uh studio so we're gonna back it up four months and we're going to go to the design faith so all the way back to november on the nineteenth which is about what we want when we want to start this process we're going to write in blue school portrait now blue means design face that means you should be downloading it if you're one of our students or if you're not you should be like if you have it already pulling it designing it creating it getting in photoshopped creating the elements so the nineteenth you're gonna start designing now you're gonna go forward to december december nineteenth in orange it's going to say school portrait ce and orange means that you're in the proofing phase of the printing face so now you've designed you've had four weeks to design and prepare it now you're going to go forward and you're going to send it to press and then of course we go forward again and I'm gonna go forward four weeks and in january now in red it's going to say school portrait's red means send to our excuse me sent to your clients so I'm gonna do this one more time backwards if you want a photograph it let's say way want to actually have the session this is that for months like oh we go back for months because this for me I had to do it very visually probably making the sound guys crazy there um if I wanted a photograph this is the actual day of the session on the nineteenth this is when that session is gonna start I'm gonna go back for weeks and this is the day I'm going to send it to the client then I'm gonna go back for weeks this is the day I'm going to send it to press to be printed that I'm gonna go back for weeks and this is the day I'm going to design it so for me I had to see it that backwards it was very hard for me to follow forward but backwards it all made sense to me so if you start to look at that time frame what that tells you is that we send out our campaigns about four weeks before we want to shoot them so when we designed this calendar our goal was to create something that was easy to follow so now when I look at my calendar I can actually see all kinds of color codes on there and very quickly anything blue on there I know that it should be in the design face so I know that these are the things I need to pull when I need to start thinking about then of course anything in orange I know that it has to be done it has to be ready to go to press by them and then anything in blue I'm sorry anything in red is going to go out to the clients so this is a system that we follow him pretty soon if you were to take the time and actually designed an entire year calendar you would very clearly start to see your mic marketing cycles you would see where you sort of ebb and where you flo what your peaks are where you're very busy and where you really start to slow down and then what it allowed us to do when we could see it so visually is we started to move things around we saw holes we would see okay in january we really don't have anything and we should try to do some different marketing well after a couple years of testing that theory we started to realize you know what in january it doesn't even pay to market because people don't spend money in the early parts of january off the holiday so once we saw that we could change our calendar around again and make it work more for what are what is r r r real to work flow so the consistency of a marketing calendar is real important anybody could do this I mean we try to make it easy but honestly a pen a paper get it all written out once you it takes you got to give yourself about a week teo to make it happen once it's done then we recommend you get a digital version that would be using something like I cowl or something where you think that will allow you to color code because once you have it an additional version now anywhere that you are you can access that calendar and add to it and help it grow and evolve now there is one color that I didn't mention on there that I should mention because we also use the color gray in my studio and great it means that it's a campaign that were not currently using we keep all campaigns on our calendar even ones that aren't successful and in the notes area we write their statistics in the results because it's happened numerous times where I tried let's say a certain special five years ago that was a total bomb and I'll have a new employee committees they have this great idea I want to do this and I could say you know what I know we did that let me go see what happened and I'll go back and I'll say okay this is what we did it didn't work how if we're gonna do it again how could we make it better and so we really statistics are very important you should be tracking how many calls you're getting what the results are on keeping that all on your calendar because that makes it a very active and live tool to use now we talked about social media but I think it's important to understand that your social media should be mapped out in calendar preferences well we teach that the first day of the month you should be riding an entire month's worth of content now it's important that you pre ride it out because as most of you know social media we all know it's this giant ship that we're supposed to be on board but every time you think you got your act together and you're gonna have some awesome post child gets sick the dog has to go to the vet I mean there's just always a reason why you're not keeping that active so pretty writing those post actually gives you the ability to cut and paste so if you know that you're gonna have a pet special in the middle of the month you're going to be sending out a holiday card still with beginning of the month and you're going to be doing something for charity at the end of the month you've pre written those post and now all of a sudden wednesday morning you've got a kid that sick in school and the dog has got to go to the bad but you know what takes you thirty seconds you cut and paste that information stick it on your facebook posted and your marketing keeps going so to take one day at the beginning of the month and dedicated to social media all of a sudden you've got a strong presence that's how you're gonna keep your growth girl going so the way we map it out for our students and for my own studio is we write the social media outlet at the beginning of the month and we implemented at the middle of the month so technically we have about two weeks to get it all out line and we start the first post is the middle of the month we always post on wednesdays wednesdays is the most important day as faras visibility on webs on web places like facebook your blog's things like that there's a reason for that and we taught all of that in belize and babies why that day is so important so my theory is if you could only do one day a week just make sure you know wednesday's a great day for it however ultimately we'd love to see you posting two and three actually the more you post the more active you are the more the better your results are going to be so my theory is to pose something every day if you could but for most of us that's not doable so at least in your mind know that every wednesday something is gonna go up and that creates that consistency as well in order to pull a pre right the social media it is helpful if you have some sort of structure paper something that you write it out we just break it down to a week one week two weeks three weeks four we have two categories so our goals at least to get two things up so we ride out what it's going to be and how it's you know and basically write the concept and hopefully get it in a cut and paste version so that we could just cut it drop it in hopefully attach an image to it and keep it going