Impressions - October/November 2015 - 49

BALANCED MARKETING
After such a disaster, one of my clients realized there had to be a better way.
We began mapping out a solution that
became the framework for a marketing
plan and calendar.
The objectives were simple:
1. Develop a proactive marketing plan
that could be controlled.
2. Smooth out the production peaks
and valleys throughout the year.
3. Minimize the exposure to one or
two "big fish."
4. Target and control the types of
clients and work they wanted to do.
5. Grow existing client business compared to the previous year.
One way to free up your time from
unnecessary, unproductive work is to take
control of your activities. The marketing
calendar does this and helps protect your
existing accounts by staying ahead of them.
The underlying idea is to ensure you
do more business with your existing clients by selling to them more often and
selling increasingly bigger orders. This is
important because finding new customers
is seven times more expensive than doing
business with current clients.
Remember, a customer is someone
who hasn't developed trust with you,
meaning they have little to no loyalty. A
client is someone with whom you have a
loyal relationship and who trusts your professional guidance.

Once that's done, sort your customer
list from biggest to smallest account based
on all the jobs you did for them in a year.
Look for the 20% limit again. In all likelihood, you will find one huge account,
several big ones and dozens of tiny, oncea-year jobs. The latter takes up a tremendous amount of your time and effort.
Think about it this way: How much
free time would you have if each client
was 10%-15% of your monthly volume?
That means you would only be working
with seven to 10 clients a month and far
fewer jobs, yet still make the same - or
more - profit.
Look for patterns in the sales data.
Some clients, such as high school booster
clubs, are seasonal in nature. They may
have several decent-sized orders during
a three- to four-month period. Others
are steady for most of the year with an
order every month or quarter. An example
might be a popular local sports bar that
does promotions around the Super Bowl,
NCAA Final Four, NBA Finals and World
Series. These may be generic images that
capitalize on the momentum of the events
without any copyright infringement or
licensing issues.

FILLING THE CALENDAR
With the sale and job information in
hand, you can start filling in the calendar.
There are many calendar programs you can
use. On a Mac, there is iCal. On Windowsbased computers, you can use Microsoft
Outlook. If you want this to be cloudbased, Google Calendar inside of Google
Docs will allow you to log in and look at
any activity from phone, tablet or desktop.
Create a specific calendar for your work
- perhaps one for screen printing and one
for embroidery. You also can create specific
calendars by niche, like schools, leagues or
interest area (e.g. 10K runs, car shows and
so on).
Put the exact event or promotion date
on the calendar for the coming year as the
hard event date, then back up one week
and make that your job-delivery date.
Now, back up 10 weeks from the jobdelivery date and tag that day as your
initial client contact date. This will be in
advance of the time most clients think
about ordering their garments.
It is important to be first in this process
because you will immediately learn if there
have been any changes in who does ordering or how the program will be managed.

WHERE TO BEGIN
The starting point for your marketing calendar is your customer list. From
your bookkeeping program, print the
job-history report - by month - for the
last two years. As you go through the list,
highlight the big jobs in each month.
On a separate spreadsheet, note each
client and job in each month and whether
it is a one-time or annual job. List the sales
amount and the percent of total sales for
that month in the columns after the job
name. Focus on the annual events.
Conditional cell formatting will automatically color the cell to alert if a specific
value has been exceeded. No client or job
should take up more than 20% of a given
month. This is ideal, but you may find examples of huge events that take up 50%
or more of the revenue for the month.
That's a big red flag. Also, highlight onetime jobs because those sales will have to
be replaced for the next year. The worst
combination is a big, one-time event.
impressionsmag.com

Creating a spreadsheet of prior jobs and how much of your business they represent, as well
as whether they are annual or one-time events, is helpful. The idea is to reduce your risk and minimize
the amount of time you spend dealing with last-minute crisis work.

October/November 2015 | Impressions

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Impressions - October/November 2015

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