How to Plan Your Marketing for 2026. Ep. 162

Are you an entrepreneur who's trying to plan out your marketing strategy for next year? This week's episode will help guide you through how to create a marketing plan for your business. Learn what I track, how I make decisions, how to achieve goals, and more in this week's episode. Let's plan for your success in 2026 together. 

Transcript

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Hi, and welcome back to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here. I know we're into December. We're closing in on the end of the year. I want to take the next two weeks to talk about planning for the new year, and then also some of the marketing numbers that matter. So if you've not yet done your 2026 marketing plan, this is gonna help you get started. So I wanna jump right in when I am planning for the new year. I start by reflecting on the current year. So what I want you to think about, set aside some time and sit down and jot out whether you are a paper and pen kind of person like I am, or you wanna talk to a notes app, or you wanna write it online. It doesn't matter, but just kind of do a brain dump. What worked? How did your business do last year? Did you grow? Did you stagnate? Did you go backwards? Did you have to hit pause on some projects? Did you go faster than you'd expected? What worked, what didn't work? This is gonna help you figure out what to do more of and what to do less of. So think about what worked. What were your major marketing pushes for the year? Did you run webinars? Did you run promotions? Did you have sales? Which of those worked? And by worked, I mean what drove leads and what drove revenue because you're an entrepreneur. If you are not making money, you are not running a business. You've got a hobby and we don't want that. We wanna make sure that you are making money and you're growing. So what worked of the different marketing activities that you tried this past year? What worked? What didn't work? Sometimes we learn more from what didn't work than what did work. I also want you to think about what you wanted to try that maybe you didn't have time to do this year. So maybe you put it on an idea list. Go ahead and look at your idea list and see what might work next year. What did you try? That was really good. Did you try something new this year that worked really well? Did you try something new? Not so good. We just won't do that again. It's okay. We all have those moments. Go look at your calendar month by month because that'll help refresh your, your memory. If you're like me and you block your time so you know what you need to focus on, then you should have that information on your calendar. So go look through. Start back at January of 2025. What did I do in January? Did I have a promotion? Did I have a focus? What emails did I send? Did I make money? Look at your revenue. Then look at February. What did you do? Did you make money? March, April, may, all the way through the year, all the way up to December? Where are you at right now? How are you doing against your goals? How are you doing compared to where you would like to be? What are you hoping for next year? So we wanna look at that. Month by month to really understand what have I done and what are the results? Then I want you to look also, let's look at your social. What did you do to market your business? So jot down where did you spend your marketing time? How many hours a week, or how many hours a month? And then. What were the results and by what were the results? I don't mean how much did your Instagram grow or how much did your Pinterest grow? I don't care about that. In all honesty, you should not either. Those are really vanity metrics. What you care about is. How many people actually came to my website from Pinterest? How many people actually came to my website from Instagram? How many people actually came to my website from my podcast? And then from there, of those people who came to my site, how many of them became paying customers or how many of them got my lead magnet because. It's going to be much easier to focus in on what's working. If you know what's working now, if you don't have all the numbers right now, or you're not sure, you've got a mess of different things and you haven't tracked it the right way. Do yourself a favor and plan on joining me in the Confident Marketers Club next month. It's gonna open up in January and it is. Exactly designed for you. I'm gonna teach you step by step how to get all of this figured out and how to track and what to track so that when you get to December of 26, you can look back, you can re-listen to this episode, and you can be like, this worked, this didn't, this did, this, didn't. Okay. I need to do more of this, and less of this. And you'll know, and it'll be so much easier to plan 27. So if you don't have it, don't feel bad right now. Just make yourself that promise that you're gonna join me in there and we're gonna get it squared away together. Now, once you have your reflection and you kind of know. What worked, what didn't work, where the money came from, what just took up your time. Now you can start to lay out the ideas for the new year. So start to brainstorm ideas and opportunities. If you have a list of things, like I have a list of ideas that I hear about, but it's not the right time to focus on them, I hold onto that and I look back at it as I pull into the new year and it's like, okay, is this something that I want to add? For 2026, is it something that I want to do in 2027? So think about it. Look at it. Look at all those ideas that you've brainstormed or brainstorm, brainstormed new if you don't have them. And then you can decide in time which ones you're gonna do. Do you have the finances now? Do you have the bandwidth? Do you need to hire someone, et cetera? Do you wanna launch a new product? Do you wanna have a new service? Do you wanna do, is this the year you're gonna create an online course or a group coaching program? Like what is it that you, you've been thinking about? Like for me, we know in 2026 I'm launching the Confident Marketers Club, while I've been laying the foundation and working on that in all of 2025, really trying to figure out who it was for and how to create it and what. The container was, and all the research and everything, so I've been working on it for the past year in the background. Now you're going to want to look at. Okay, actually planning out your year Now, I'm somebody who likes a big dry erase board in my office. It's a dry erase calendar'cause I can adjust it. I also still have a school aged child. You may or may not have kids whose schedules are dependent upon you. I look at the school schedule, that's honestly the first thing that I write in are the school breaks, because those do impact my life because as of right now, my son is still in elementary school, so I start with school breaks. When is he going to be off? When are there half days? When is fall break? When is spring break? All of that. If you know you've got a family vacation you wanna take, go ahead and put that on your calendar. Are you going to take Fridays off? Do you wanna work four days a week this year? Go ahead and put that on your calendar if you know how many hours a week you wanna work, think about that. If you wanna work 20 hours a week, but you plan yourself out with enough work that you need to work 60 hours a week, you're gonna be really frustrated. So really think about how many hours do you. Realistically wanna work in your business next year because between you and I, you don't have to work 40 hours a week just because that's the traditional that we're used to from corporate. You're an entrepreneur. If you can get everything you need done in 15 hours a week, why work 40? If you wanna grow and scale, maybe this is the next year that you do work a little more. Maybe you dedicate five hours a week to growing and scaling and figuring out what happens next. You think about it, you are in control. You're the boss. So if you are not living your dream life, if 2025 did not feel like you had control over your schedule, you did not have what you wanted, this is your chance to set a new intention for 2026. Tell yourself you're gonna block time. I time block on my calendar and it helps me get more done because I look on Monday and I know I usually look honestly on Sunday and kind of map out the week what is it that I need to get done this week. And as I'm doing that. If there were things I can't get done this week, I start mapping them out for next week so that when I get into next week's planning, I know I've already got these three priority items that I need to work on, so I kind of have an idea of how much I can get done in a week. If you haven't done that, I highly recommend it because it does help you manage what you're doing. Now I want you to think about goals. What do you want to achieve in 2026? Think about the year as a whole, but let's really focus in on Q1. So how much money did you earn this year? Do you wanna go up or down next year? How many hours a week did you work? Do you wanna go up or down? How many clients did you serve? Do you wanna go up or down? Think about that and then start setting goals that are going to really align with. The lifestyle that you want, because I know you want freedom and you want flexibility, but you also want to make money. We can't be a hundred percent disconnected from our desks and our work and make money like you gotta do both. But we don't have to be tied to our desk. I don't believe in hustle culture. I believe in working very strategically and very smart. So think about. What those goals are. Try to set smart goals. These do make it easier. They're specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. So set Q1 goals. Think about what you want for the whole year, and then look at how you can set yourself up for success in Q1. If you wanna make a hundred thousand dollars in 2026. Then ideally you wanna make 25,000 in Q1, which is a little over 8,000 a month. If you wanna make half a million in 2026, then you need to make 125,000 in Q1. So think about what your goal is and then what you wanna look at is how am I going to achieve that goal? So if you look at your prices and your clients, like, how many clients do I need to take on? To make$8,000 a month, how many do I need to take on to make 25,000 a month? How many do I need to take on to take to make a hundred thousand a month? And I want you to think about, is this really realistic? Is your goal realistic? If you're at a.$25,000 a month right now, are you truly gonna get to a hundred thousand dollars a month in Q1? Probably not. That's a four x increase. You would either have to take on four times the client load, four times the students something. So make sure that they're, they feel achievable because if you set goals that do not feel achievable, you will not achieve them because you'll feel defeated by them. So keep them. Keep them set up in a way that you feel like you can make it and you can figure out what you would need to do to achieve that goal, because you need to have a plan behind your goal. What I was taught was a goal without a plan behind it is a wish. They're fun, but they don't come true. When you take that goal and you map out a plan to achieve it, it's a lot easier to stay on track. Now you're going to start looking at your Q1 calendar. So you've got your goal, you know what you wanna make for revenue for the year, you know what your big promotions are. Now it's time to start to map'em out. So what are you gonna do in Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4? So start looking at that. How are you gonna break these larger parts up across the year? And then just map out Q1. If you've got a promotion in Q1, you're going to. Launch a new course, you're going to have a group offer. You're going to run a promotion for the beginning, new year, new you, whatever it is, plan that out, mark it out and start to look at when am I gonna have this event? What are my event dates? What do I need to get done ahead of time? What content do I need? Do I need to optimize? Do I need to run ads? Like put together your actual marketing plan for that. First event, that first Q1 event. You don't have to put together the marketing plans for everything right now, but you should have a good understanding of what you need to do in Q1. Then as you get back after the holidays, when you start back in January, you can sit down and really like fill it in and get very tactical. But for now, Q1, I'm doing this. So for me, Q1, I'm launching the Confident Marketers Club. I am also very likely launching simple SEO content. I'm planning on doing one in January, confident marketers, most likely in January, and the simple SEO content group in February. And then March will be a little quieter because March is spring break. Now that may move because we're taking a family, we're planning a family trip. Either February or March. So I may swap things around depending on what happens with our personal family schedule and all the school, um, all the school vacations. Full transparency. I am recording this at the end of September. I have not yet done all of my planning for 2026. I will be doing it probably right after fall break in early October when things slow down a little bit. But right now I'm trying to batch out all the content to get me to the end of the year. So you're gonna review your marketing plan, you're gonna determine what your focus is for that year, and then what you're really focused on for the quarter. And then you're gonna get your very first, at least your January stuff on your calendar so that when you come back January one, you're ready to go. Make sure you've got it all written down so you know where you're at. Make sure you're building enough time in between projects so that you have some white space on your calendar. You don't want to go crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, like you need some breathing room. I know part of the reason that I am. Really focusing on, um, podcasts this week, is that starting next week over the course of the following four weeks, I have limited work time because next week my son has early outs on two days. For the end of the quarter, the week after that is fall break. The week after that, he's off school on Monday for Columbus Day, which is also part of fall break this year. And then the week after that, I go to Nashville to meet with my Mastermind. So by the time I have a full week, full childcare, full everything, it's October 27th. So I'm trying really hard to work ahead because I know October is gonna be busy for me and I want to be able to take fall, break off with him and be able to be present. I don't wanna be working a whole lot that week. And then. You know, I'm also, oh, by the way, launching simple SEO content in October. It'll be over by now, but I'm launching that in the week between fall break and my trip. Not ideal, but for you, for my customer, October is a better time to start a new program than November, so I'm squeezing it in there. So yeah, sometimes you have months that are a little busier than others. But I want you to look at all the different things on your schedule to figure out what are you doing and when. So I'm hoping that this has helped you. What you wanna do is really look at what is it that you're trying to achieve in 2026? When are you going to do it? And then how are you going to achieve those goals? You've got to put that plan behind the desire or it's not gonna work. Now, if you are feeling a little overwhelmed, you're like, Rachel, I'm not quite sure how to do all of this. Join me in the Confident Marketers Club. We're gonna have information out soon. We'll be enrolling in January. And we're going to go through this together. I'm gonna walk you through how to audit everything that you've been doing, how to figure out what's working and what's not working, rather than just going off your gut that tells you something's not working. I'm gonna show you how to have true data that says, this works, that doesn't work. And then I'm gonna walk you through. This is your sales funnel. Here's the different focus areas. This is what your funnel needs. You go work on this first. Your funnel over here needs this. You go work on this, and then you're gonna come back and we're gonna review it, and I'm gonna help you and make sure. You are set, and I want you to become a confident marketer. I want you to feel so comfortable with what you're doing because that my friend, is how you will be able to say no to the things that do not grow your business, which will free you up. To spend more time doing the things that do make a difference, which will get you ready to grow and scale. I wanna make sure everything is working for you organically before you start putting a bunch of ads behind it. But whether you want to grow and scale with ads, with additional organic, or with even affiliate partnerships, we're gonna talk about how you do all of that. The Confident Marketers Club. If you're really wanting to get ready for your website, you wanna do your SEO, you wanna get that visibility'cause that's your first step of your sales funnel is the visibility. You can get yourself started with simple SEO content. It is a six month program. You can actually join that now if you take the free class on the website, you'll be invited in. You get a full six months access to me in that program. Otherwise, the next big launch, the big enrollment period will be most likely in February or March.'cause we're gonna do Confident Marketers Club first. Alright, that's it for today. I will see you back here next week for our final. New podcast episode of 2025.