Planning an entire year’s marketing calendar can feel like a momentous job. And it is a very important one. But it can be done, and it can be done in a half day’s work!
But why do you need to plan your marketing calendar so far in advance? If you’re not one for planning, it can seem a little excessive. So here’s exactly why you need to be mapping out your marketing plan for the year.
Why Your Yoga Studio Needs a Marketing Calendar
The truth of the matter is that if you don’t plan things beforehand, they often don’t get done.
A social media post can go straight to the bottom of your list of things to do in a day if you’re busy and don’t feel creative. It then ends up getting pushed off, maybe indefinitely. After all, what’s one missed day of posting?
Well, if you want your business to grow, then consistent marketing is key. These are the reasons you need a marketing calendar to plan your strategy:
- Grow your business
- Achieve specific goals
- Stay organized
- Execute events so they’re effective and go off without a hitch
- Feel relief by getting this out of the way now
- Spend more time on the internal details of your events and make them even more awesome and engaging!
I’m sure we can all agree on the why. Planning your marketing calendar has many upsides, but let’s look into the how.
See our video on our Marketing Calendar Lab from the 2019 Yoga Business Summit here! ⤵️
This information was originally presented at the 2019 Yoga Business Summit. For more incredible yoga business marketing content, check out this year’s Yoga Business Summit, October 10-16, 2021 in Puerto Morelos, Mexico.
How to Plan a Marketing Calendar
The first thing you need to know about planning a marketing calendar is that it’s going to take a singular focus. Why? Because although your brain can process many things in a short space of time, it can’t process them all in one moment of time. So you’ll need to block off a few hours out of your day to focus on ONLY your marketing calendar. That’s the most efficient way to get things done!
Using these steps, you can plan your yearly marketing calendar in no time at all (under 5 hours).
Choose a Platform to Host Your Calendar
The first thing you’ll need to decide is where your marketing calendar is going to go. It’s important that you have it somewhere that other people can access it too. This way if a marketing company takes over your strategy, they can see what you had planned, or at the very least, see what marketing was done in the past.
Google Sheets is a great platform because it allows more than one person to work on it at the same time. The bigger your team, the more enticing this benefit is. If you’re looking for a marketing calendar software specifically designed for the job, then these are your top options:
- Visually
- Wrike
- CoSchedule
- CrossCap
- Monday.com
- Newscred
Write Down Your Goals
It’s imperative that you know what you’re doing this for. Over the next year, what goals are most important to your yoga studio? Marketing goals often look a lot like this:
- Increasing brand exposure
- Gaining new leads
- Making sales
When you’ve decided which goals are most important to you, then you can make sure that every campaign works toward achieving this outcome. Having a clear idea in your head of where you want the business to go makes the rest of the job a lot easier.
Decide on Your Marketing Strategies
Before putting anything at all in your marketing calendar, you’ll need to decide on a marketing strategy. This way you’re not wasting time and energy on platforms that aren’t going to help you reach your goals.
Yoga studio marketing can include a range of different strategies, but what’s paramount is that you choose the right ones for your brand. Here are a few examples of marketing strategies:
- Content Marketing – Content marketing focuses on creating and sharing content with your audience. This is often done in blog format and enables you to share valuable insights with your audience. You can include guides on how to do specific yoga poses and facts about why yoga is so good for you.
- Email Marketing – Email marketing is one step more personal. It allows you to send emails to your entire mailing list – these will generally be people who have already practiced yoga at your studio. These can include event alerts, upcoming promotions, or simply share snippets of information and link to the posts you’ve created for your content marketing strategy.
- Social Media Marketing – Social media marketing is planning content to be posted on your social media platforms. For yoga studios, Instagram and Facebook are probably all you need. However, if your business is a little bigger than platforms like LinkedIn and TikTok can also be used.
- PPC Advertising – Pay-per-click advertising is a marketing strategy that involves placing ads at the top of Google search results. You only pay for the advert if someone clicks on your ad. This is great if implemented locally, but if you don’t know what you’re doing you can waste a lot of money. So it’s best to get a professional to work on your PPC.
Pick Out Important Dates
Now that you’ve decided on your marketing strategy, you can go ahead and start planning your content. The best way to do this is to start off with important dates that you could monopolize on during the year.
How about planning a women’s day special to encourage new female yogis to join? When’s your yoga studio’s birthday? You might be able to work in an event around that – and content to go with it.
Start Populating Your Marketing Calendar
In the beginning, you can simply populate your marketing calendar with ideas e.g post an infographic about the best yoga poses for posture. From there at least you have an outline of what is going to be posted on what day.
Once you have a starting point, creating the actual content becomes a lot easier. Or if you have the budget, you can pay someone to do that part for you. But at least this way you still have control over the type of content that’s being put out there.
The Yoga Studio Marketing Calendar You Won’t Regret
Spending a couple of hours on your marketing calendar might seem very daunting. But it doesn’t have to be. With your marketing calendar as your singular focus, you can knock it out in a couple of hours, and feel much more organized for the future.
Creating your marketing calendar is the first step toward reaching your goals for the year. So if increasing your revenue, or creating brand awareness is important to you, then getting the first part done will put you one step closer to achieving your goals!
If you’re ready to create insane, bottom-line busting marketing strategies that sell more yoga in 2022, check out the 2021 Yoga Business Summit in Puerto Morelos, Mexico. We’ll spend 7 days and 6 nights refining your core messaging, creating a plan to sell more yoga, and designing strategies that benefit your studio – and your sanity – years into the future.
This year’s summit is designed to help you navigate the upcoming industry changes to positively impact your bottom line.
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