Planning your marketing three months at a time can make running a business considerably more manageable. A year can feel too far away and, as we've all discovered over the last few years, an awful lot can change in 12 months. Planning week by week, on the other hand, can leave you constantly chasing your tail, trying to think of something to post, promote or talk about at the last minute.
Quarterly planning gives you a useful middle ground. You have enough time to work towards something meaningful, while still having the flexibility to respond when your customers, your business or the wider world changes.
In episode 249 of The Monday Morning Marketing Podcast, we talked about how we approach quarterly planning for our own businesses and our clients, starting not with social media posts or content ideas, but with something much more important: what you're actually trying to achieve.
Start with where you want to end up
Before you start filling a content calendar, decide what you want the next three months to achieve. Your goal might be to generate more enquiries, increase sales, reach a new audience, build your email list, improve your visibility within a particular industry or establish yourself as an expert in your field. You might want to publish more blogs, secure speaking opportunities, promote a particular service or simply become more consistent with your marketing.
The important part is having a clear destination because, without one, it's very easy to spend three months producing content without knowing whether any of it is actually helping your business.
Once you've identified your goals, share them with the people who need to know. That could include your social media manager, VA, graphic designer, marketing team or accountability partner. If you're a team of one, write them down for yourself. The point is to make them visible enough that they influence the decisions you make during the quarter rather than becoming something you thought about once and then forgot.
Three months also gives you enough flexibility to adjust. If you achieve a goal more quickly than expected, there's nothing stopping you from changing it or setting yourself a more ambitious target. Your quarterly plan isn't something that should restrict you. It should help give your marketing direction.
Decide how you're going to measure progress
Once you know what you want to achieve, you need to decide how you'll know whether you're getting there. This is where your KPIs, or key performance indicators, become important.
If your objective is to generate more enquiries, for example, increasing your Instagram followers might be nice, but it isn't necessarily the number you should be concentrating on. You might be better monitoring website enquiries, calls booked, email sign-ups or leads generated through a particular campaign. If you're trying to build awareness, reach and website traffic may be more relevant. The measurement needs to relate to the goal.
Benchmarking is particularly useful here. When I start working with clients on my Supported Digital Marketing Strategy Training, one of the things I do is establish where they are at the beginning. When we review their performance several months later, we can actually see what has changed. Without that starting point, it's much harder to know whether the work you're putting in is making a difference.
You don't need a complicated dashboard containing every metric available to you. Choose the measurements that tell you something useful about the goals you've set and monitor them consistently.
Look backwards before you start looking forwards
Planning isn't only about deciding what you're going to do next. One of the most useful things you can do at the beginning of a new quarter is look carefully at the one you've just completed.
What worked? What didn't? What did people buy? Which questions kept coming up? Where did your enquiries come from? Which content attracted attention and, more importantly, which content resulted in people taking action?
Your analytics can tell you a considerable amount about what your audience is responding to. Perhaps the platform you've concentrated on for years is no longer where your customers are engaging with you. Maybe short-form video is beginning to generate more attention, or perhaps the blogs you've been neglecting are quietly bringing valuable traffic to your website every month.
This is also the point where you need to be willing to stop doing things simply because you've always done them. If something is consistently taking time and producing very little in return, ask whether it still deserves a place in your marketing. Continuing with a tactic purely because it has become part of the routine isn't a strategy.
Put your time off into the plan first
Before you start adding campaigns, events and content deadlines into your calendar, put in your days off.
It sounds almost too simple to be part of a marketing strategy, but knowing when you and your team are unavailable makes everything else easier to plan. If you know you're going to be away for a week, you can prepare content, manage client expectations, schedule necessary work and decide what genuinely needs attention while you're gone.
The same applies to conferences, networking events, awards, speaking engagements, training days and other commitments you already know about. Add them to your calendar and think about whether there is marketing activity surrounding them. Do you need to tell your audience you're attending? Are there tickets or discount codes you can share? Will clients need to know you're unavailable? Could the event itself generate useful content?
A good quarterly plan isn't just a list of things you want to sell. It should reflect what's actually happening within your business.
Look at what's happening around your business too
Once your existing commitments are in place, look at relevant events, awareness days, industry dates, conferences and networking opportunities that could fit naturally into the quarter.
The important word here is relevant. There are hundreds of awareness days and novelty dates available, but that doesn't mean your business needs to talk about all of them. If an awareness day connects genuinely with your business, values, audience or personal story, it may deserve a place in your content. If you're desperately trying to work out how Talk Like a Pirate Day relates to your accountancy business, you can probably leave it alone.
This is also a useful opportunity to research what else is happening within your industry. There may be conferences you haven't previously attended, new networking groups, local events or speaking opportunities that put you in front of the people you actually want to meet. You won't necessarily know about those opportunities unless looking for them becomes part of your planning process.
Review how often you're posting and where
Quarterly planning is also a good opportunity to challenge some of the habits you've developed around social media. Do you actually need to post every day? Does every platform deserve the same amount of your time? Are you publishing because the content serves a purpose, or because you've decided you "have to post"?
Look at the frequency and performance of your existing content and make decisions based on what you're seeing. You might discover that three useful Facebook posts each week work better for you than posting every day, or that your audience responds much more strongly to one type of content than another. You may even decide that a particular platform no longer deserves the time you're giving it.
Calls to action should also be considered at this stage. If one of your objectives is to grow your email list, your content needs to give people opportunities to subscribe. If you want more enquiries, make it clear how somebody can contact you. If you want your content shared, occasionally ask people to share it.
Follower numbers and likes can be encouraging, but don't let vanity metrics become the entire purpose of your marketing. They might indicate that your visibility is improving, but ultimately your marketing needs to support the wider goals of the business.
Give yourself a quarterly SWOT
If you've followed me for a while, you'll know that I regularly come back to SWOT analysis: your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. There is a reason for that. Businesses change, markets change and our own strengths and weaknesses change too, so something you identified six months ago might look completely different today.
Perhaps you've gained a new qualification or introduced a new service that has created an opportunity. Maybe a particular part of your marketing is being neglected because you simply don't have time to do it. You might need training, additional support from a VA or a few hours blocked out every month specifically for content creation.
A SWOT shouldn't be an exercise you complete and then file away. Its value comes from deciding what you're going to do with the information. If you've been writing "I don't have enough time" under weaknesses for three quarters in a row, something needs to change. That might mean outsourcing, automating, simplifying or stopping something altogether.
Consider the seasonality of your business
Almost every business has some degree of seasonality, even if it isn't immediately obvious. There will be periods when people are more likely to enquire, buy, book, research or make decisions about what you sell.
For my own Social Media Training business, for example, I can see particular periods when interest tends to increase. September and October can be particularly busy, there is another period of interest around the beginning of the year, and then another smaller increase as businesses approach the summer and realise they still haven't tackled some of the marketing tasks they intended to complete.
Understanding those patterns means you don't have to wait until your busiest period to start marketing. In fact, you probably shouldn't. If you know demand increases in February, start preparing people before February arrives. If Christmas is your busiest sales period, your marketing needs to begin considerably earlier than December.
A simple seasonality tracker can help you identify when people enquire, when they buy and when different services or products tend to perform best. Over time, that information can make your quarterly planning much more effective because you're working with existing customer behaviour rather than constantly starting from scratch.
Plan ahead, but don't plan yourself into a corner
There is nothing wrong with having an outline of what you want to do over the next year. Product launches, major campaigns, events and seasonal activity often need to be considered months in advance. What we wouldn't recommend is creating and scheduling every individual piece of content for the entire year and assuming the job is finished.
Things change. Your business can change, your customers can change, platforms can change and sometimes major events happen that make scheduled content inappropriate or completely irrelevant.
Quarterly planning gives you enough structure to prepare properly without removing your ability to react. You can have an annual direction while still developing the actual content closer to the quarter in which it will be published.
Your quarters don't even have to follow the traditional January-to-March, April-to-June format. If your business is particularly seasonal, it may make more sense to create planning periods that reflect your own sales cycle. Some businesses work better in four-month blocks or around particular busy periods. The calendar needs to work for the business rather than the other way around.
Turn the plan into actual content
Only after you've gone through your goals, KPIs, previous performance, calendar, events, SWOT and seasonality do you really need to start thinking about individual pieces of content.
By this stage, content planning should actually be easier because you're no longer staring at a blank calendar wondering what on earth you're going to talk about next Tuesday. You know what you're trying to achieve, what your audience has responded to previously, what you're promoting, what's happening within the business and what important dates are approaching.
From there, you can decide what needs to become a blog, social post, email, video, podcast or campaign and work backwards from the publication date to give yourself enough time to create it properly.
That's the real benefit of quarterly planning. It isn't about producing a beautifully colour-coded spreadsheet that nobody looks at again. It's about giving yourself enough direction to know what you're doing while leaving enough flexibility to respond when things change.
Your marketing should support where you're trying to take the business over the next three months. If it doesn't, it's worth asking why you're spending time doing it in the first place.
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