How to Map Out a Marketing Plan

One of the things that I tell my clients on a regular basis is, “If you want a full practice in six months or if you want to have clients in six months you need to be marketing today.” Sometimes it actually takes more than six months to turn a cold lead into a warm prospect, then into a prospect who’s hot and ready to buy. That process doesn’t always happen overnight.

If you want clients in six months you need to be marketing today—every day. Creating a structure around your marketing and creating a calendar and a system to keep you on track is massively important. Now, you may think, “Oh, I don’t want to be boxed in. I don’t want to be structured,” but allow me to share this with you. If you are waking up in the middle of the night wondering, “Where is my next client going to come from?” That can be completely eliminated when you put together a marketing calendar and a marketing structure.

Here’s my advice to you—my recommendation for you this week. Map out what you’re going to do on a daily basis to get clients. Map out what you’re going to do on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis, on a quarterly basis and perhaps, even on a yearly basis. You’re going to create your own marketing pie, where every single slice of your pie is either something that you do to find your ideal clients, gathered for you in large numbers and inexpensively or ways to pull your ideal clients in. Every slice of your marketing pie is something that goes on your calendar.

Your Client Attraction Assignment

My recommendation is that you get a year-at-a-glance wall calendar. (Laminated works great so you can write erase.) Start listing out what you’re going to do on a daily basis. Maybe you do one thing every day and map it out. Then, what are you going to do on a weekly basis? What are you going to do on a monthly basis, etc? Now, you’ll have some structure. Now you can pop this into your calendar—whether it’s your year-at-a-glance or outlook or google, whatever you use is fine.

Once you’ve mapped it out and scheduled it on your calendar, not only do you have a system and structure, but you also start marketing so much more than when you were flying by the seat of your pants and doing ad hoc marketing. The added benefit is that you no longer have these 3:00 AM sweats worrying where your next client is coming from because now you know you’re doing something every day, every week, every month.

Having a system in place gives you a great amount of confidence and confidence touches every single part of your client attraction. It’s really important that you keep your confidence up. Get that calendar. Map it all out and then begin to do it. Just follow the calendar. I even color code mine and so can you. It’s going to be so helpful for you and you’re going to get so many more clients because of it.

Here in my own business, we’ve got the whole year mapped out—the entire year of everything that we’re doing. We map it out in December and then we’re set for the year. No more flying by the seat of the pants.