3 Steps to Create A 12-Month Launch and Promotion Calendar

December 2, 2015 10 Comments

If I had to recommend one thing you can do to grow your business fast, this would be it: create a 12-month launch and promotion calendar to market your courses and programs that works backwards from desired annual revenue.

When I sat down for the first time to create a 12-month launch and promotion calendar, it seemed a bit overwhelming. My flexible, creative side kept saying, “How on Earth can you know what you will be promoting or creating a year from now?”

Here are 3 Steps to Create Your Launch and Promotion Calendar:

Step 1: Work backwards from your revenue goals.

Focus on creating an “earning plan” vs a marketing plan. To do this, you need to work backwards from your desired revenue or “magic number”?

What is your magic number? Write it down.

How many customers do you need to say “yes” to hit that number? You can calculate this by dividing the average tuition of your online course or program by your “magic number”.

Write down the number of enrollments you need to attract.

Step 2: Schedule in your course launches and other offers.

Before you can schedule your launches into your calendar, you need to determine how many times you will launch your online course (and any next level offers).

There are typically 5 different options:

• 4x a year: This is a great option to grow your tribe. You can launch your course or offer once per quarter and grow your reach each time you launch.
• 2 or 3x a year: This is a good option if you plan to launch more than one program.
• 1x a year: This option works when you have an established following and can confidently fill your enrollment goals for the year with one course opening.
• Evergreen: An “evergreen” launch means you have your offer available at any time on your website. This works when you you are generating a high level of traffic to your course or program site.

Now, you can schedule when you will “open the doors” to your online course launches into your calendar.

In our Create 6-Figure Courses® programs, I recommend a 14-16 day promotion window for each launch date. Over the 14-16 day time frame, you will deliver rich teaching content such as a preview webinar, compelling email copy and other support content.

You can schedule in the promotional windows for each launch by working backwards 16 days from your course open date. Grab a sticky note and place it 16 days out from each course open date.

I use desktop calendars on a wall with sticky notes. Because I offer more than one program, I use different colored sticky notes for different program launch dates. It looks like this:

After we plug all the dates into the wall calendar, we move the dates into a digital tool that allows our team to manage our launching and content creation tasks for the year. Our team uses Teamwork® to do this.

Step 3: Determine the focus of your free (and paid) content marketing.

To really amp up the growth of your community, you will want to deliver powerful content that attracts your ideal prospective client. When you do this strategically throughout the year, you can build momentum and build your list in between your launches. Think of this content as “lead magnets” that attract your ideal clients. The goal of every single piece of content you create is to attract the leads you need to hit your revenue goals for each launch. Great lead magnets:

1. Answer a question: The free content you create for your tribe should thoroughly answer one question and set up a new question that will be answered by your launch content.

• Include a call to action: Every piece of content on your content promotion calendar should also contain a call to action that leads your prospect one step closer to joining you in your main offer.

For example, when you write a blog post you should include a call to action to opt-in for a free tool or free webinar in the post. You can then promote this post more than 16 different ways to expand your reach with this one piece of content. For example, one way to promote your blog post is to take snippets of the copy and promote on social media with a link back to your blog post. Another way is to run Facebook ads to lead potential prospects to your post and the call to action. For as little as $5 a day, you can create a steady flow of prospects. When planning your promotional calendar, you should choose topics and tools to offer in your free content that lead directly into your next promotion on your calendar. Every piece of free content you create should be valuable enough that your prospects will opt-in for it. [Click here to tweet this] 

2 Things You Can Do Now To Start Building Your Calendar:

• Click Here for the Instant Access Recording, “Build Your 12-Month Launch and Promotion Calendar”where we will walk through this process step-by-step. Click Here to Get Instant Access to the Webinar Recording
  
• Share this post with your tribe. Curating and sharing great content with your audience increases your tribe’s top of mind awareness of your brand. Click here to tweet this post. Click here to share this post on Facebook.