Project Plan

Building a Marketing Routine

Social Media

DailyContent for Blogging and Articles

Below, you’ll find a sample marketing routine for business owners to think about for their own business. It’s fairly comprehensive, but totally customizable based on what your needs. As far as implementing your own marketing routine, you may want to think about it like working out; we don’t just walk into the Turbo Kickboxing class on our first day at the gym. If you haven’t been doing anything routinely, pick just one activity and work it into your routine for the next month. Then pick a second and so on. If you already do some of these items, add in one new item at a time. Success comes with consistency and repetition.

• Facebook, LinkedIn and/or Twitter* - update or post• Engagement – Check Facebook for any engagement

and respond. Consider using a tool like Nutshell Mail (free) or MarketMeSuite (paid).

• Listening Online - Select a few big names in your industry or great resources in your industry and be sure to read information from them. This might be daily or it might be weekly.

*Twitter—Twitter tends to be something that is more di�cult to use. Unless your prospects are on Twitter, I would not recommend using Twitter. It is, however, a great search tool.

Sit down for a half day and create an editorial calendar that details the themes and topics you’ll use each month for the next 6 months. Think about using monthly or quarterly themes.

Lead Generation

WeeklyPersonal Notes

Spend at least one hour per week working with a strategic partner or talking with a strategic partner to build your referral business. Think about the various things that you might be able to do with a strategic partner—maybe it’s o�ering a white paper, seminar or webinar with a partner. Maybe it’s simply deepening the relationship with a partner or maybe it’s putting together a list of partners and developing new strategic alliance relationships.

When you �rst start out doing this, try to do it at least once per week. When you’re ready, maybe you can increase it to twice per week, etc.

Handwritten notes are very e�ective in keeping in touch and showing that you care about an individual. Every Thursday send at least 2 handwritten notes to colleagues, past clients, strategic partners etc. Alternatively, a tool like Send Out Cards works well when you want to include a photo or wish to mark a birthday or anniversary.

Every Friday, review notes on any prospects or partners that are in play and send any follow-up resources.

If you’re new to blogging, try to aim for posting a blog weekly. Blogging might be written, video or audio. You could use all three forms for your blog.

Follow-up Friday

Blogging

Commenting Online

© 2014 Duct Tape Marketing

Project Plan

Building a Marketing Routine

Newsletter

MonthlyPress Releases

Email marketing newsletter once per month. Pick a target date like the 15th.

Once a month, have a strategic partner guest post for you or interview a strategic partner for a guest blog video or audio post.

Aim for once a month as these are great for enhancing your SEO and building quality backlinks to your site. Using a quality distribution is important in terms of delivering great results with higher quality links as well as better opportunities to get that call for an interview.

If you hire someone new, attend an industry conference, speak at an industry event, bring on a new client, it is a good idea to send out a press release to keep your company name in the news. Be sure to have agreement from clients as to whether or not you may reveal that you are working together.

Speaking Event

QuarterlyEbook or White Paper

Set a goal to do a speaking event once per quarter. This can be something for your local Chamber, for a group of home-owners, a not-for-pro�t, whatever audience you like, but the idea is to get out there and get your business out there.

Check your local search pro�les at least quarterly to ensure they are up to date and make any necessary changes. These are pro�les like Yahoo Local, Google Places, City Search, Yelp, Merchant Circle, etc. Rather than spending an immense amount of time updating all of these individual sites, you might want to try Universal Business Listing or Yext. While these services do have an upfront cost for use, if they allow you to login in to one portal to deliver updates, I would recommend them.

Directories are also getting noticed by the search engines and being considered more credible so it’s important to take advantage of what this kind of service has to o�er.

Creating quality content on a regular basis is necessary for lead generation. It does take time but if you take the time to plan out your content, creating quality downloadable lead generation documents will become less stressful and provide more bene�t when you look to your core business objectives to guide your content. Remember to be helpful and not selling.

How are you spending your marketing budget? Is it driving sales?

Review Marketing Budget

Local Search Profiles or Directory Listings

Guest Blogger or Interview

© 2014 Duct Tape Marketing

Project Plan

Building a Marketing Routine

Client Appreciation Event

AnnuallyHoliday Cards

Pick a month that works within your calendar and work with a few strategic partners to host a client appreciation event. The idea here is that each of you will invite clients as well as some prospects that would be good for your business as well as for your strategic partners. At an event like this, your clients will tell your prospects how much they love working with you and ideally will help close the deal for you. Think about hiring a videographer for this event so you can capture video testimonials to use on your website.

This project plan was submitted by: Ann Gusi�, Gusi� Marketing Group; Kelly Weppler, WH & Associates

You can send a holiday card or a Happy New Year card. It’s good to be sure to touch your clients regularly to let them know they are important to you.

Getting Ready

In case you don’t have these in place, consider adding / implementing the following: • Duct Tape Marketing Hourglass – Go through the exercise of mapping out your marketing tactics for each of the 7

stages of the customer buying experience. Find the holes and fill them.• Editorial Calendar to plan your content. Use spreadsheet or online calendar.• Marketing Calendar to plan and track all your marketing activities. Use spreadsheet or online calendar.• Marketing Budget• CRM – Customer Resource Management software. Use a cloud-based CRM to be able to access and manage your

contacts from any device.• KPIs – Key Performance Indices – Set these up to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts

Think About...

• Starting with one thing• Making a priority list of what your current marketing tactics are• Your Marketing Hourglass – make sure that your marketing routine takes into account your tactics. You don’t

want to miss any. • Creating a shared online calendar to schedule your marketing• How often do you really need to be posting?• How often is reasonable for you to post on social media?• What can you do? And what can / should you outsource?• Measuring the e�ectiveness of each of your tactics / activities.• Selectively adding tools as needed – remember that the idea is to keep things simple. Only add tools that really

© 2014 Duct Tape Marketing