Podcast Episodes
The Secret to Growing a Powerful Marketing Calendar

Jason Owens, Founder of Renewable Confidence

Having a viable marketing calendar is the most powerful thing you can do as a business owner, yet putting one together often seems way too daunting.

To trim down the overwhelm, I offer a more sensible way to approach a marketing calendar.  Give this quick episode a listen and let me know what you think.

In fact, you can send your comments to me because I am using this very method myself.  Let’s do it together.

Call to Action

Ready to build a marketing calendar?  Share this link with one of your partners in crime.  Join forces and accomplish more together.

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Click to Get the Full Transcript

Jason: (00:04)
Hey everyone. I’m Jason Owens.

Welcome to this episode of The Renewable Ronfidence Podcast. A show that helps you build confidence in yourself and in your business every day.

This episode is called The Secret to Growing a Powerful Marketing Calendar.

I am your host, thrilled to be with you here today. Let’s jump in and get going. All right. So here’s what I’ve seen in some of the coaching work that I’ve been doing, and not only recently, but also just kind of a kind of through the years when we first started talking about marketing calendar. Uh, there’s, there’s usually one reaction to that, and that is, Holy cow, this is a lot to think about, right? If you, if you kinda go all the way to the end and you look at what I’ll call a mature marketing calendar, you have someone who is doing email marketing. You have someone who’s doing social media, you have someone who’s doing blog posts, you have somebody who is doing podcasting, and all of these media are all linked together.

Jason: (00:58)
Okay? So if you have a particular topic, you’re going to talk about that topic on your blog, you’re going to discuss it in your podcast, you’re going to send out an email that has a link back to the blog, which has a link into the podcast, right? So I mean there’s a lot of moving pieces here that all get integrated together. Now, for most of us, that’s an awful lot to think about, especially if you’re not in the content marketing world, which is like this where we’re creating podcasts or you’re creating videos or whatnot. Say you have, um, financial services companies say you have a retail shop, right? So you’re, you’re not always going to be in to creating a whole bunch of content, right? Just to drive foot traffic or to get people to book appointments with you. So when I think about a marketing calendar, for me, the secret is dialing it all way back and starting where you are.

Jason: (01:49)
One of the very easiest things that you can do is simply just say, Hey, once a month I’m going to send out something. Okay? That can be a quote. It can be a, um, a newsletter. I mean you can do anything. You can be as complex or as easy as you want it to be. Uh, I’m thinking back to you as almost 20 years ago, I’m thinking back to an accountant and he had, he was not using any email marketing software, nothing whatsoever. It was literally just sending this through his g-mail account. Um, and this worked then. I don’t know that it would work now because Gmail would probably spam you for doing this, but he would do a blind carbon copy to every one of his clients. Now again, I don’t know that you can do that these days because there’s a limit on how many people you can blind carbon copy.

Jason: (02:38)
But basically he would take his entire address book, paste it into the BCC field, you know, there’s email and he would just send it out, Hey guys, don’t forget, next week is the deadline for such and such. Boom and hit send. I mean literally it was a one liner. I was on that distribution list for awhile and it was brilliant because he would have people get back to him and say, ironically, they would get back with him and say everything but the exact thing that he just sent out. So if he has, if he sent out a message on payroll, it was, Oh my gosh, I’ve been meaning to get with you about such and such. I’m inheriting some money, you know, blah, blah blah. So ironically, what you will find with a lot of the email marketing, the email outreach that you do is whenever people do get back to you, don’t be surprised if it has absolutely nothing to do with the thing that you just sent out.

Jason: (03:27)
Okay? What matters is that you stay top of mind. And that’s one of the reasons why I like email marketing. If I were to ask you today to go ahead and start doing some kind of marketing, one of the easiest things you can do that’s actually gonna move the needle for you. I would say start on email if you’ve been following me for any amount of time. You know that I’m a huge fan of email marketing. I like social media for the awareness, but if you want the conversions, uh, you’re gonna see this time and time again, no matter what industry I’m in, who I’m working with, who I’m talking to, who I’m listening to. Social media is great for awareness. Email’s great for conversion. That’s pretty much a standard thing I’ve run across time and time again. So just start where you are. Okay.

Jason: (04:08)
Again, once a month, send out something. And again, it doesn’t have to be super complex. Uh, no. A nonprofit that I’m, I’m around right now, they send out a monthly newsletter work in. Great. Okay. I know other people that I work with, they send out something kind of periodically and okay. And then by periodically I mean that they kind of make it up as they go along. There’s not a whole lot of strategy to it. And to be very candid, there’s not a whole lot of return that they get out of it either. So I would be intentional about it. You can go to Walmart for heaven’s sake and grab a desktop calendar that’s going to be, you know, one of those big pads that I think is probably, I don’t know, like a, that’s probably a foot and a half tall by about two feet wide, right?

Jason: (04:49)
Okay. And it’s got a huge page for each month of the year. You can just grab one of those for like three or four bucks. It’s not expensive. And you can use that to begin mapping out what your content can be throughout the course of let it just make it easy. Just make it a quarter. Okay. Just three emails, right? So you’re going to have a monthly email that’s going to go out on this particular date and we’re going to talk about this, right? And your email itself doesn’t need to be totally complicated. I’d keep it less than a hundred words. Write something really simple. You don’t have to go crazy with graphics. You don’t have to go crazy with your logo, just sentences and links back to your online store or link to your calendar where someone can book an appointment with you. Right? It doesn’t have to be overblown, but I think it does need to be strategic.

Jason: (05:33)
Okay, so next thing, if you are already at that level, right, and you’re, you’re comfortable being able to do one outreach per month, I’m going to ask you to do that two outreaches per month and these two outreaches are going to have different flavors to them. The first flavor is going to be what I call an education piece, which basically says, Hey, did you know that I do? Boom, right? Did you know that I have this? Okay? Did you know that I offer such and such? Okay, you’re not trying to, Oh, you’re not. You’re not your aim. There isn’t what I call a promotion. That is a the second type of email that I want you to do. So let’s talk about the education piece. All you’re simply doing is just educating people to something that you do. Ideally, you want to have a link there that will bring them into a website where you talk more about it.

Jason: (06:18)
Okay? So, Hey, did you know that I also talked to people about converting a CD? All right, fine. Have a link that goes into your scheduling software. Hey, did you know that I offer a line of candles in my store? Boom. Link it back to your candle section. Hey, did you know that I offer massage therapy too? Right? Okay, so link, boom, right? So go into that section of your store that talks about that service. So that’s kind of where I would take it really to the next level. Now your second piece is what I call a promotional piece. So after you’ve educated people about things that you have, you want to run a promotion about something that you have as well. Now, please don’t, don’t go the immediate step that most people do. Hey, if I educated people on my line of candles, gosh, I’m going to offer them some promotion on my line of candles.

Jason: (07:10)
After that, I wouldn’t go that route only because people are going to ignore your first email in the month after awhile because they know you’re going to talk about it again and offer them a better deal later on in the month. Okay. So you want to have your education and your promotion to kind of be offset. So within that quarter that I was talking about, I would like you to do three education pieces and then on your promotion, whatever month it is, make sure that your promotion for that month is not the same thing as your education for that month. Right. Okay. So that would be kind of the next step. So if you are growing your marketing calendar, those are, those are two very easy things to do. Now of course, what this leads back to is, Oh my gosh, Jason, I don’t have anyone to email to. Okay.

Jason: (07:57)
Well I’ve talked elsewhere about how you can build your email list. So if you want the scoop on that, I’ll be more than happy to send that over to you. What I’ll have you do is just type me an email very quickly. You want to send it to support@renewableconfidence.com in the subject line. I just want you to write these words, build my list and then you can hit send, I’ll know exactly what you mean by that. I’ll send you back an email that will have a link to a special hidden audio that I’ve created. And so you can’t find it on this podcast feed, but it’s a hidden audio and you’ll learn like my entire methodology that I use to go ahead and help clients build their lists. So [inaudible] that goes hand in hand of course with having a good marketing strategy as who in the world am I going to send this to? Well, I’ll help you out with that as well. So overall, uh, the big secret is start where you are. Grow gradually, start where you are and just add a little bit each month. So anyway, that’s, that’s

Speaker 3: (08:56)
the secret. But start somewhere and do something. Make sure you’re strategic about it. Don’t just kind of wing something off. You can’t get over to the first of the month and realize, well, I haven’t sent anything out. Gosh, what do I do now? Nope. Be strategic about it. The people who are strategic are the ones who are actually winning on email marketing. Okay? Don’t just send something out because there’s a date on the calendar. Be very strategic and methodical about what you do. If you want deeper help with this, reach out to me@thatsameemailsupportatrenewableconfidence.com and let me know how I can help you. We’d be more than happy to see what I can do to help you grow your business. All right, so Hey, if you would please go into the show notes for this episode, so it’s renewable confidence.com. You’re going to see the big podcast section there.

Speaker 3: (09:38)
Go to the secret to growing a powerful marketing calendar. You’ll see the show notes there with the transcription. What I’ll have you do is look for the resources, which is should be, if you’re on a phone, you should scroll down and you’ll see the resources area. It’s going to give you very, very clear instruction on how to give me a rating for this podcast. Would love to get some more ratings here. Does a ratings mean more traffic? And Hey, I could use some more traffic. All right, so that’s that. Hope you guys are doing great, and I’ll see you on the next episode. Take care everyone. Bye.

Posted on Sunday, Oct 27

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