How to Create a 12-Month Marketing Calendar That Works With Your Practice
Did your holiday or New Year’s marketing plan succeed the way you wanted? Or did you find yourself scrambling at the last minute to try to meet your goals?
Marketing your practice works best when you have a strategy. Carve out time to brainstorm how you want to talk about your practice. In an hour or two, you can create a 12 month marketing calendar full of content and promotions for your business.
Here’s how to get started:
Review your offerings before planning your marketing calendar
If you have been in your health practice for 3 or more years, you likely know what your clients want. And you know which of your programs and products deliver the best results.
If you don’t know, now is the perfect time to do some research.
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Look through all products and services that you offered last year. Which ones were the most popular?
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Review the top 20% of your client roster. What health goals did they reach by working with you? What elements of your practice worked best for them?
Gather client results and testimonials
You can start with a survey that you send to your clients to ask about their experience with your protocols. But it can be difficult to get people to complete surveys.
If you do send one, your survey should be short (10 or fewer questions). Add a mix of multiple-choice questions and open-ended, free write questions.
If you haven’t spoken to your clients about their results, now is the perfect time to interview them.
You will get better insights into what’s working for clients. And you’ll also get better testimonials when you have short, one-on-one discussions.
Plot out your practice’s peak seasons
Most health practices have regular high seasons. For diet, fitness and lifestyle practices, that time is after the New Year and through the Spring. That’s when most people resolve to get healthier, lose weight, and work on improving chronic health conditions.
Some practices also have a second peak season after Summer. The Fall energy of September and October get clients in “back to school, and back-to-routine” mode.
These two seasons are when you can plan to launch a new program, re-open a group program, or offer a new service or product.
Leverage health awareness events
Are you a specialist in one area of health? If so, you can use national health awareness months to frame your marketing messages.
For example, if you’re known as the heart health specialist, you can leverage February’s American Heart Month in your content. You can find a list of U.S National Health Observances at healthfinder.
Take note of major holidays
Why do holidays matter to your marketing?
Certain holidays may trigger a desire to make habit changes – i.e., New Year’s Day spurs resolutions.
It’s a great time to launch your latest challenge. That could be a cleanse, fitness program, quit smoking plan, or other plan that gets your clients big results.
Your MBODY360 practitioner portal is a great place to start if you want to launch a holiday group program.
Other celebrations may cause clients to put their health goals on hold. For example, Thanksgiving in the US is often a time of indulgence in favorite foods. Weight loss clients may put their diet on hold for the weekend, or extend the hold through Christmas.
During busy seasons, you can offer a “holiday survival” plan for clients who might get off track.
Use the MBODY360 practitioner portal to assign clients to a specific plan and supplement regimen. As clients use the app to follow their plan, you can leverage the automated messages to guide them without adding more hours to your day.
Create your marketing calendar
Get your marketing team to plot out each quarter with program launches and content ideas. In each quarter:
- Pick the dates where you will launch, or re-open, a product or program
- Work backwards – what content can be created to support that launch? For example, say you are launching a supplement line for digestive wellness. You will want to develop content that dives into the importance of digestion.
- Where will you publish your content? For written content, you may have a newsletter, an email list, or a blog. Your social channels might include YouTube, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.
- For each month, map out topics on a calendar so that you have an organized plan.
While you can plan out 12 months in advance, know that your marketing plan doesn’t need to be set in stone for the whole year. But having a framework for the year can help you stay on top of your goals.