Improve client communications and generate more enquiries by creating and implementing a marketing calendar for your firm.

A 12-month marketing calendar will help you to implement a steady stream of activities throughout the year. This ensures that your potential and existing clients are communicated with across several different channels, thereby making your marketing more effective.

It also helps you to manage your resources so you can spread your manpower and cash flow to fit with busy and quiet times of your practice.

I suggest creating the Calendar in Excel, so it is easy to circulate to others and to amend. This calendar can then be circulated to all staff, so they can see what activities will be taking place and when. It should also be used to monitor your marketing activities and to make changes as required to improve results and take on board new opportunities that may arise.

The calendar should set out:

• Which services you want to promote or topics you want to update clients with, e.g. GDPR, MTD etc.
• Who you want to promote these to (if you have different groups of clients/prospects)
• An overview of the message which needs to be communicated, e.g. free IHT health check, forthcoming MTD seminars, launching a new probate service etc.
• The different types of marketing activities that will be adopted (e.g. mailings, attending events, advertising campaigns etc).
• Who’s responsible for implementing
• What budget you have allocated to the activity
• The actual timings/deadlines
• How you will monitor the success of the activity (number of enquiries received from an advert, attendees to a seminar, visits to a particular page on the website, engagement across social media channels etc.

By setting out your marketing activities in such a way it helps you check that you have a comprehensive plan of activities across the year, thereby avoiding a ‘feast and famine’ approach to your marketing.