“Start planning for 2021 now!”
That’s something you know you should do…but what does that even mean?
It means setting goals and mapping out plans to achieve those goals. Here’s what that looks like for me:
Set revenue goals > Convert those goals into a marketing strategy
To do this, I reverse engineer the buyer’s journey. That sounds fancy, but the buyer’s journey is just the process of making a purchase. First, you’re made aware of a problem, then you look for solutions, and then you choose a solution.
Awareness > Consideration > Decision
Your stomach lets you know you’re hungry, you Google “food near me”, and you pick a restaurant.
Revenue Goals
Before creating revenue goals, I look at data from the previous year. I paid close attention to where the money came from during my first year. Here’s the percentage breakdown by service:
Web Design – 55%
Video Production – 30%
Photography & Branding – 15%
My next step is to create an annual revenue goal. To do that, I looked at my expenses and considered the lifestyle I wanted for myself.
For the sake of this example, let’s say my annual goal was 20k. I like to break my goals down by quarter, but you can do monthly or weekly if you want. If I divide my annual goal by the 4 quarters in a year, that’s 5k a quarter.
5k a quarter looks like –
Web Design – 55% – $2750 a quarter
Video Production – 30% – $1500 a quarter
Photography & Branding – 14% – $750 a quarter
Now, you could stop here and have a good foundation for building a marketing strategy. But we can take it a step further.
Continuing with this same example, let’s say my average web design project was $1200, my average video production gig was $500, and my average photography and branding project was $200. That breaks down to –
2.3 web design projects a quarter
3 video production projects a quarter
3.75 branding projects & photography gigs collectively a quarter
I’ve just simplified my annual goal down to how many clients I need to bring in quarterly. Now THAT’S the kind of data you want to inform your strategy.
Creating Strategy
Before creating my strategy, I look at more data. I survey where my clients came from over the last year. For example, most of my web design clients are referrals; I rarely get them from social media. So, even though I need to make the most money in that area to achieve my goals, it wouldn’t be a good use of energy to create a bunch of social media content for the purpose of bringing in web design clients. Instead, I can use that time more efficiently somewhere else. On the other hand, my video and photography clients are more likely to come from social media.
So now what?
Let’s go back to our buyer’s journey.
Awareness > Consideration > Decision
If the goal is for folks to decide on DawnG Media, they first have to be made aware that they have a problem. Then, they need to learn that we can solve that problem. To do this, we emphasize the effectiveness of video & photography in social media marketing. We recognize the pain points around trying to create this content yourself and offer ourselves as a solution. This is part of our strategy.
With web design and social media management, we know most of our followers aren’t ready to make that investment yet. So, we continue to support them in the interim by giving them resources and information they can use to continue bootstrapping until they’re ready to invest. This is part of our strategy.
This was a very simplified explanation of establishing goals and creating a strategy. But the point I’m trying to drive home here is that there is a strategy.
Even without knowing all of the marketing trends and best practices, you can still use what you know to create a plan for yourself. Don’t just wing it!
