Let The Marketing Calendar Drive Your Brand's Growth transcript

in the earlier stages in particular do everything you can to get at least four major moments throughout the year the thing I want you to notice is that in all of these moments you get a giant Revenue Spike and what you start to realize over enough time is that that giant Revenue spike is actually something that you can harness and repeat yourself it doesn't happen to you you create it I rarely talk about the thing that probably has the largest impact on your revenue of anything that you're doing and that thing is the marketing calendar some of which you do not control like the seasonal calendar Father's Day Mother's Day holiday Etc others of it that you do have control over like product development product releases sales Etc today on the enderis podcast I'm going to get into why you should be paying more attention to the marketing calendar that is actually at the core of driving revenue for your business jump in right now so Taylor holiday has a thing called for Peaks theory if you've followed Taylor's content for a little while you've seen him reference this and the basic idea is that there are Four Peaks in your calendar that can work throughout your whole year it's a really helpful framework uh as a way of thinking about what is going to drive Revenue in different moments and he talks about it a lot and um I'll have some more to say about four Peak Theory specifically in a little bit but the thing that I really like about that is that in the midst of a lot of other content from Taylor from CTC from smart person like him right about how to optimize all these little things in your business and financially plan your business etc etc etc one of the things that he has really clued in clued into over the last I don't know couple of years or whatever in his content uh has been that the marketing calendar is actually the thing that is driving huge amounts of the value that you create in your DC business and and so Four Peaks theory is one part of that but if you listen to any of his other content you'll see there's actually a lot more to it than that and so today like the basic the basic point that I want to get to today in this episode is just that that is right that uh the maybe most important Revenue things that can happen Revenue uh movers that can happen in your business are actually not really in the ad account the ad account is supplemental to and and help serve those things um and actually the the and and here I'm talking about Revenue right because because profitability is sort of a different question this consideration of the marketing calendar it's a really important consideration but it's slightly different than what I'm thinking of I'm thinking really of growth I frame that poorly I mean it's it's about profitable growth still it still is about profitable growth but uh but what I'm thinking here is of like what is it that really moves the needle in major ways and that you see giant spikes in your revenue and the answer to that is often the marketing calendar so sometimes what happens is it's like an ad hits or whatever uh but uh but also sometimes it it's not that at all it's things that you have absolutely no control over and so I want to give you a framework for thinking about this issue uh and and begin to get you to get your head around where your business is at right now and what the implication of that is for how you should be thinking about the marketing calendar in your business okay because what I think is missing from some considerations in in some ways including Taylor's four Peak Theory but uh I'm kind of aide the point different businesses of different sizes are going to approach this issue differently so if you think about this right um just the Baseline consideration here is that when you launch a new product when you have seasonal Tailwinds or headwinds and when you have a sale those three things in some way or another have a massive impact on the amount of Revenue you can drive in your business okay so let me just go through each of those first okay so product release I actually want to put that at the end let's talk about seasonality first so seasonality is this incredible driver that and one of the things I've been saying to clients recently is that basically seasonality is an unfit impact on your Revenue many businesses try in some ways to fight this and and and unfit is actually probably overstated there are some ways to fight it but um but seasonality just has this huge huge effect an example that I always think of here is that uh when I ran FC Goods uh which I've talked about a lot of times right uh FC Goods just is wallets made out of baseball gloves it just is a great Father's Day product and a great holiday product and so for two different 30-day periods a year there was a huge amount of Revenue that was going to come no matter what sale I ran no matter what product released no matter what else it was just going to be the case that we were going to generate large large portions of our Revenue in those moments and because it was a b it was a wallet made out of a baseball glove Mother's Day was not like that if anything there were probably headwinds for us for Mother's Day because we probably couldn't compete uh with all of the mother's a Brands which is a major gifting moment for people couldn't compete with all those brands in the auction for the same clicks uh because it was actually it was probably a negative uh seasonal moment and uh you can think of this in all kinds of different categories right if you're selling sunscreen you know summer is going to be much bigger than winter for you uh if you are hey yeah I don't even need to go down the list you get the idea what I think many people don't realize is that there's a seasonality factor that is larger than you think at many points of your business uh so apparel is probably the place where this is most obvious to me where there are apparel brands that uh you know obviously again if it's swimwear you know it's going to be a summer Peak right but other brands may not even realize for as much as they're aware of seasonality like imagine if you're selling like leggings or something like that you you probably are sort of thinking of that seasonally but I bet you the seasonal movements the seasonal impact on your ability to sell leggings are more significant than you are realizing if you haven't really gone down this road a few times so um so I'm not even going to try and do too many specifically examples because every business is so different in this respect but just note that seasonal Tailwinds and seasonal headwinds are essentially part of what should form your marketing calendar and are having a huge impact on your ability to drive Revenue at scale in your business okay so there's there's one number two sales um promotions in a traditional sense large ones small ones whatever you and I both know that sales can make a huge gigantic ridiculous impact on your business um you run a sale at a certain time and you are going to see a whole bunch of Revenue be driven that was not there before um this is specifically for brands that are newer younger whatever maybe um haven't gone down this route a few times uh haven't gone down this route too many times before you will see you launch a sale if you haven't run one before if you haven't run one very often and you'll have this huge spike in Revenue especially if it's like a pretty good offer uh that just otherwise you don't know about I don't need to tell you that sales work they work of course they do the one thing I'll say here is that I think most most brands can run sales and some brands are a little too precious about never discounting okay major higher-end fashion retailers uh run sales right it's you can do it okay so and then number three product releases and so product releases are a huge part of this as well uh where new products have this ability to take fans of yours people who love your business already and if they like your brand and if the product makes any sense can generate a whole bunch of returning customer Revenue in your business when you launch the new product they'll probably generate some spike in new customer Revenue as well people who were floating around your list but you didn't have a great reason to talk to them or um they hadn't quite found the thing they like from you but you released a new product and now they love that again think of apparel here like they're interested in your brand but they you just they just don't quite have the piece you don't quite have the piece they're looking for launch a new product and then uh suddenly it works okay but uh crucially no matter what happens at the moment of launch new products also give you new fodder for your your ad account for your influencer um business any of those things you know whatever whatever you're using to promote your business organic content Tik Tok whatever um and now you can supply those channels with new fuel basically to acquire new customers and so maybe the new customer impact on launch of a of a new product is relatively small but the uh new customer uh but the new product uh impact on new customer Revenue after launch as you start promoting more can be really really massive and really important because it can be something that really takes off every new product you launch is new creative for your ad account by definition and so you can um build new creative around that and see how that goes okay so those three kind of basic categories right seasonality sales promotions uh uh and uh new products okay but here's really what I want you to think about um you will notice on these moments that there is a giant spike in your Revenue because of one or in some cases all three of these things really smart Brands will actually to align these you take the Tailwinds of seasonality you run a sale and you launch new products in ways that uh capitalize on that you probably do new products and sales slightly different slightly differently right so you launch new products week one and then two weeks later maybe you do a sale off some products that um that are maybe you have too much of or or whatever you know there's all kinds of reasons to do it but um but you can really capture Tailwinds uh significantly if you can combine up seasonality with one of the one of the two of these these other ones right um if you wanted to try and combine sale and new product typically the way to do that is with pre-order where you uh you give people a discount for buying in advance you help your cash conversion cycle Etc incredibly cool opportunity coming up with my friends at more Staffing that I want to tell you about you've heard me talk about more Staffing amazing staffing agency in the Philippines to help connect you with amazing e-commerce talent in the Philippines but one of the concerns that many people have about working with overseas talent in general is managing a remote team dealing with the challenges of you know language and time zone and how do you really incorporate them into your actual team and so uh I was talking to more safing about that and they are putting together a webinar really cool opportunity totally free uh the webinar is going to be called managing an international remote team in the e-commerce world the mass massive advantages and the serious pitfalls it's going to be co-run by two people one of them is Laura gavar the CEO of more Staffing who you've heard me interview on this show before but it will also include Greg KY the uh co-founder of more Staffing founder of with Lara who has managed in his us business a team in the Philippines of like I think 20 some odd employees at time so he's gone really deep like executive talent in the Philippines for his us us-based business e-commerce talent and they're going to talk all about um yeah all the upside and how to avoid the pitfalls it's going to be really really good it's going to be on April 25th Thursday April 25th at 10:00 a.m.

Pacific 1 p.m. eastern time in the US don't miss that if you've heard me talk about more Staffing and you've thought I'm interested in this but I've wondered about like how to actually do it really well this is going to be a great opportunity for you to get a little bit deeper so go check that out the link for it is in the show notes of this show whether you're watching on YouTube or listening somewhere whatever the link is in the show notes to go get ready to put that on your calendar don't miss the opportunity to think about how to manage a remote team with uh lar gavara and Greg KY for more Staffing it will be really really helpful the thing I want you to notice is that in all these moments you get a giant Revenue Spike and what you start to realize over enough time is that that giant Revenue spike is actually something that you can harness and repeat yourself it doesn't happen to you you create it okay so you create the revenue Spike by being smart about your marketing calendar relative to um relative to all of your other efforts and this can do something significant which is that you know you launch a new product and if it goes great maybe you Forex your sales over the you know course of the couple of days of the product launch because it it's a hit and people really like it and so suddenly you get this giant Spike your revenue and that's awesome or you have you run a sale and for four or five days or however long you run the sale your Revenue goes crazy and you're not spending nearly as many ad dollars to generate that Revenue as you would at other times and I say that because what happens very often for smaller Brands is that they are hammering away at all of these Evergreen kind of things to make their business better they're split testing this and that and they're um trying to get you know send more emails and they're um trying to make their email capture better and they're launching new ads and they're running new offers and all of these things and all of the goal here is to try and get it so your ad spend goes from 50 Grand a month to 60 Grand a month or from 60 to 100 or whatever and those things all matter and they can all help a lot but what can happen sometimes is that Brands can exist as if that's the only way to grow the brand all of these Evergreen efforts instead of I'm going to plan my spend and my other efforts in concert with these marketing calendar efforts as well and there's a reason that that's those two go against each other one of them is sometimes like I said it's sort of feels like marketing calendar is like the special add-on to an evergreen brand you know your brand is mostly the things that you do most days because that's what eats up most of your time you know uh you know it's 25 days a month or whatever uh this is what you're doing uh and then occasionally you mix in a sale as opposed to you actually plan all the things you're doing around the fact that this Revenue spike is yours to be harnessed and you can plan as many of them as you want so that's part of it it just sort of feels like it's a tack-on additional part of your business business uh to to mess with the m marketing calendar right to go engag with the marketing calendar in these unique ways but secondly uh it's also because the uh marketing calendar is a ton of work uh it's like you if you're going to run a sale if you're going to launch I mean launching a new product especially right it requires the product development end of things you have to shoot it you have to build pdps you have to do all of this different stuff to make uh to to bring new products to Market and so it's just this huge job for what sometimes feels like a very small Spike and that can feel like that for a sale too you need all kinds of new graphics you got to change over the website you got to launch new ads that are just sales specific and and build emails and SMS just just for this thing that's only going to last a few days so is it really worth doing right and the and this is fundamentally why brands at earlier stages have a really hard time with the kind of advice that I'm giving in this episode which is attack the marketing calendar and this brings me back to Four Peaks Theory here is the main suggestion I want to give you about how to think about marketing calendar moments in the uh life cycle of your brand and in the growth stage of your brand okay basically what I want you to think about is that Taylor's idea of four Peak Theory and I've linked it in the show notes uh is is the place to start in particular in your marketing calendar it may be true for the entirety of your business in the sense that there may be Four Peaks that are larger than any other Peak you ever have no matter what you do in the earlier stages in particular do everything you can to get at least four major moments throughout the year those could be holiday they could be sales they could be new products whatever it is but if you're you know sub a couple million dollars in Revenue no matter what else you're doing make sure that you gener generate four major moments in your calendar obviously aided as much as possible by uh seasonal Tailwinds okay so as much as you can capture the season ality Tailwinds that you have in those moments and generate four big moments okay that I think is a great starting place for your business but over time I want you to think about how can you as your business grows not just hammer away at the out account not just try to make it so that your email and SMS get better and your email capture gets better and whatever and not just you add on Google ads if it wasn't working before those things can all be a good use of your time but as your business grows as you add team members as the capacity to Output more product and more sales and things like that grows take the resources that you have in a growing business and apply it to adding more Peaks consider doing that for your business for some businesses this won't make much sense but consider trying to add more Peaks as you go okay so I'm I'm uh working with an apparel business right now that's sub five million in Revenue right around five million in Revenue probably going to do right around five million in Revenue this year I look at that business and I say how can we get to six to eight Peaks this year and by Peaks I just really mean promotional moments okay something like that right but when they get to 10 when they get to 15 when they get to 20 when that happens like at that point I'm gonna expect that six to eight to turn into 8 to 10 10 to 12 Etc to create more and more moments and that could be it's an apparel brand it could be large major product releases for different seasonal moments and then smaller middle tier ones for different seasonal moments and you could be mixing in sales more often and you could be mixing in you know uh maybe there's a an end of season sale here and maybe there's a middle of the peak season sale and so me you could just add these things up along with Black Friday and S Monday right mother maybe there's Mother's Day or a Father's Day moment like who knows depends on the brand all those things but you start to layer those things on until you get to a point where one brand I consulted with when they started realizing this dynamic in their business they said you know Andrew one of the ways that we've grown over the last few years is that um we now release product every two weeks on payday and by payday they just mean the most common payday in the US and so that we time our product release to the days when people have the most Expendable income and maybe they want to uh go buy something nice for themselves they just got paid and so that's what we do and that has massively fueled our growth and we've built our entire operational process around doing that really well this brand did that and that by the way this brand never ran sales and so uh that brand got re they grew a lot by making that the core of their promotional calendar or their their marketing calendar without even promoting without even doing promotions per se and that I think is like exactly what the the way to think about this is your business may be different than that that that business uh in that respect and they were doing that on their way to $50 million in revenue or something like that right so they had a a larger team they could execute these kinds of things more often but they could uh they could do that and it really worked new product constantly fueled this and the thing I always point out is that like I said earlier the thing about new product is it gives you a moment like like you know on payday like it was for these Brands but at the same time it also gave this brand new fuel for the at account and so they were able to take that new product they were releasing and turn that into something that generated more Evergreen revenue and grew their ad accounts along with it because now they had new uh more fuel for the fire uh and and more attempts or maybe maybe the better analogy there' be more more logs to throw on the fire to make the fire bigger right because they just kept adding the logs of new uh new product okay and so uh so beginning to think that way as they scaled up their organization they were thinking about how do we build the organization to support this as the growth strategy the growth strategy based on the marketing calendar was driving them the organization and the process was built to serve that growth strategy built around the marketing calendar and that's the right way to think about this um another time I saw this was actually way back in my days at Kao uh when I was at Kao silicone wedding ring maker like if you're watching this right this this is my this is a killer ring um when I was there which is where I cut my teeth in e-commerce um I noticed that we did is they would release new product and it would go really well there' be this big spike in revenue and so at some point somebody looked around somebody else was probably Taylor who was there as well and he said uh somebody said we got to release new product more often and so we did and now look it didn't mean that every product release was was gigantic at some point there's only so many silicone running rings Etc but they did nonetheless think they were able to think about along the way or they were able to generate along the way Peak moments with simple color variations and style variations and those kinds of things and so um so yeah so uh at some and you know I remember thinking at the time wait a minute can you just manufacture Revenue like this just like make a new color and just release it and it works and the answer was n not every release was as big as every other release but yes you could and you can think that way in your business this is so obvious in one respect but I think when you're in the day-to-day and in the grind of an e-commerce business it actually you can lose sight of how much this can really really matter and what I really think it comes down to is is like I said sort of the planning and the strategy element of it and so here's what I would give you if you want a place to start uh if you want a place to start if you could get yourself to and you'd have a ladder to this one product release and one promotion every month that would get you really really far uh and that is maybe more manageable than you know product releases every two weeks on payday right um now it might not be that's still and the promotion doesn't have to be huge by the way some bigger some smaller some same with product releases some bigger some smaller Etc and for a lot of Brands you're not there yet I get that um executing those things really well is important as well um and actually it's worth noting that in a few weeks I'm going to record uh an episode of opening the books where I'm GNA coach somebody through a product release so if you don't if you feel like you're not very good at executing the product release um make sure to subscribe to this uh podcast because very soon I'm gonna have an episode where I talk through exactly how a brand ought to do a major product release so um so there's a whole execution component of this as well you put that all together though you start running promotions and you start running um product releases really well fueled by seasonality and fueled by the ad account fueled by good email and SMS you have the core of a business that can get pretty big pretty fast that is a 20 plus million dollar e-commerce business maybe a $50 million e-commerce business basically done by doing those things really well and then building the rest of all of your growth strategy all the tactics all the forecasting all the financial planning all the ad strategy all the measurement all those things around how do you spend during those moments how do you spend uh between those moments how do you capture value in those moments how do you make sure to do a great job on each of these channels in those moments and between those moments how do you make sure that your email list is segmented well all whatever right all of those different elements of the tactics can support that growth strategy and in time what you also do is give reasons for your customers to care pay attention give attention to your brand because you're leasing cool stuff you're giving them offers and you're making it possible for them to engage with your brand in a regular consistent way that provides real value to them and provides uh value back to you as you grow so that's the way that I would think about this if you are not giving serious time to your marketing calendar if you don't have if you're not thinking about stages of your business again don't kill yourself here if you're sub a million dollars you do not need uh 12 product releases a year and 12 promotions a year like I just suggested right um but uh but to begin to think about uh about how your marketing calendar is developing how you can use and create uh genuine moments in your brand for your customer to care about it will provide huge spikes in Revenue a bunch more fuel for your advertising fire and a bunch more profit and growth in your business thanks so much for watching for listening again today huge shout out to my sponsors that is uh more Staffing virtual professionals uh virtual assistant can be helpful virtual professionals can change your business also to my sponsor Billy newer sponsor on this show go get Billy go to billy. to go get Billy on your website is seriously a no-brainer for anybody running meta ads it will help you get better data quality uh from the activi that's happening on your store back to meta for better growth uh better customer matching Etc okay so go do both of those things uh make sure to subscribe what wherever you're watching wherever you're listening subscribe to this like I said in the show I've got an episode coming up that'll be a great compliment to this and opening the books or I coach somebody through a product launch that's going to be great so definitely go check that out or go go subscribe wherever you are and of course you can reach out to me uh by emailing me Andrew AJF growth.com [Music]