The 2024 Free Content Marketing Planner

When it comes to marketing your business, it’s important to have a plan of action. Laying out a schedule of events that you know you want to talk about to your audience can save you a lot of rushing around. Whether you are printing leaflets, organising events or scheduling emails. Prior planning will make your deadlines a lot less daunting.

It's best to plan at least six months ahead with your promotions, such as seasonal sales and competitions. This gives you more time to fully realise your ideas and build upon them. You're not going to have all your best ideas over a single cup of tea but once you've got a few rough outlines down well in advance they'll stick in your brain and develop over time.

To help you start the planning process, we’ve put together a Free Content Marketing Calendar. This planner features dates that you might want to tie your business marketing into. It also gives you space to include your own plans as there are bound to be some industry-specific events you will want to get involved in. 

This year, we've put together a special edition of the calendar featuring all the relevant awareness days for conscious businesses to take note of. Whether you're planting trees or supporting your local community, you'll find the dates you need to communicate and celebrate the impact your business makes on the world. 

When you've got your plans in place, you can confidently prepare in advance and leave time for spontaneous marketing if opportunities arise. You can get your copy of our 2024 Content Marketing Planner by clicking the image below:

5 Tips for Planning Your Marketing

1. Understand Your Audience

You will have a lot more success with your communications if you know who it is you are trying to resonate with before you start. Knowing what interests your audience, as well as the tone of voice they use and what they value, can all play a key factor in how your message hits home. You can use tools like Google Analytics to find out some of the demographics of your audience, learn more about what appeals to your customers by talking to them in person or getting involved in their conversations on social media.

2. Build on Past Successes

There's nothing wrong with using a tried and tested method for increasing your audience and customer base, so if a particular type of competition, press push or discount has worked well for you in the past, do it again! Previous customers will be familiar with your promotional activities and may well have been looking forward to you running that sale or special event again.

3. Make a Realistic Budget

If you were in business last year you should know which marketing activities worked and how much you spent on them. It's all very well taking into consideration definite costs such as advertising but don't forget how much your time is worth. Creating engaging, shareable content can be done on a very tight budget but it's important to remember how much of your own time you'll be putting into doing so and how that will affect your costs.

4. Be Adaptive

So you've got your plan in place, you know when you'll be starting to gather stock for your sale, writing up your press releases and sharing your content on social media, but remember to keep an eye on what's going on in the news. Some of the best marketing successes have arisen when people have noticed a trend and jumped on the bandwagon with a clever promotion or tie-in within a short space of time.

5. Measure Your Success

If you're doing online marketing using links to your site or running a newsletter campaign, use Custom Campaign URLs, a URL shortener like bit.ly and Google Analytics together to see exactly who clicked what, when they clicked it and if that click actually turned into a sale. This way you'll know pretty soon which campaigns succeeded and which fell a bit flat, enabling you to improve your future marketing efforts.

Success in 2024

Pushing through the noise of your competitors can be really hard, especially as a small business, but consistent clear communications to your current and potential customers can improve your reputation and help you achieve your goals for 2024. If you haven’t downloaded your copy of our Content Marketing Planner, you can get it by clicking the image below:

From all of us here at Create, we would like to wish you a very Happy New Year!