If you don’t think you need a promotional calendar for your beauty business … Think again! Without a planning instrument your business will not have any organized structure to it.
Promotional calendars help you set up launches of new products and promotions for the year. It can act as a road map or system for your beauty business. The promotional calendar is also for setting up your planned income for any given year.
For instance, let’s take a look at Valentines Day. Do you have a promotional plan for Valentines Day? If so, have you set it to your calendar? When are you scheduled to begin your promotion?
Okay, most people would think that a Valentine Promotion should begin in Mid January. Not necessarily. The promotion to your email list will begin in Mid January but the actual planning phase should begin by July and that’s late in the year.
Why? Because depending on what you promote, unless you ordered your inventory for Valentine’s Day when you ordered your inventory for Christmas, you’ll be placing orders in Mid November for your Valentine Day Promotion.
Sounds like a lot to do? Not really. Your calendar should really be planned a year out.
By the end of every year, as a business owner you should have worked on a plan of how you’re going to approach the coming year. Not there yet? Begin where you are!
What do you want your business to look like a year from now? How will you plan it out? What promotions will you launch to get you there? Does your business allow you to promote your product for Holiday’s like Christmas, Mother’s Day, and Valentine’s Day? Better yet, can your product open up doors for you to promote Spa Week, or Grandparents Day?
Once you decide what promotions you’ll do during the year, what will you offer? What inventory will you need for each campaign that you promote?
These questions are just the beginning of what will become the template of how you sit down and plan out your year of promotions for your beauty business. A successful campaign can be done over and over again with tweaks here and there.
If you rolled out a campaign and it didn’t give you the results you wanted, take a look at what worked and what didn’t. Keep the good and recreate another approach for the ugly.
There is no bad here, just great information for you to pull from after you’ve done a promotion for your beauty business.
Setting up a promotional calendar doesn’t just apply to your holiday promotions. One of the most neglected items promoted is your content. Do you write and post content to your website? If you don’t you should. If you do write and post, do you promote what you write and post?
For years, we didn’t promote our content. We were diligent in posting weekly to our blog and at least twice a month to our website. Yet, aside from a weekly newsletter to out list, we did not promote the content. Posting to Facebook and Twitter has allowed us to gain more eyeballs on the content we post.
Whenever possible we also try to get guest post on other related websites, so that we can get before relative readers on other peoples platforms.
As a woman working from home, you set up calendars every week. Whether you have children or not, you’re always planning activities that you are involved in. Shopping, working out, cooking, after school activities, hair appointments, Friday night dates and the list goes on and on.
If you’ve come out of Corporate America, you’ve always worked with promotional calendars. It’s now time to bring those skills into your beauty business and watch it sore. That’s it for this week. As always …
Dedicated to Your Success
Juliette & Robert Samuel
