Episode #011: Planning Your 2022 By Quarter
Planning Your 2022 By Quarter
Join Zach as he walks you through how to plan your 2022 for success - by quarter. Learn how to...
Analyze your current offers (and ideas) to get the best results in the new year
Create an "at a glance" of your plans that takes up just one page of paper
Turn your ideas into a clear action plan that helps you reach your goals.
All that (and more) when you tune into this week's episode.
Links Mentioned on the Show From Zach:
Full Transcript:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, episode number 11. And in this episode, we're talking about planning your first quarter of 2022. So if you're thinking about getting a clear action plan in place to grow your business next year, this episode is for you, so stay tuned.
Hey, hey, hey, not so average marketer. Welcome back to the show. I am so excited to be here. First off, I should apologize. I am fighting a little cold, so you might hear me be a little nasally, a little coughy, but I want to make sure that I get an episode out to you this week, because last week was a holiday. We didn't release one. I was sick another couple weeks ago. It's been crazy. We have family members with little kids who keep passing it around to us. Anyway, just wanted to get that out of the way, because I want to get into this week, talking about planning out your 2022 and really, what you can do to start getting results in your business from a plan.
See, a few years ago, when I was planning, I used to kind of say, oh, what am I doing next week, or what am I doing next month? But I never really stepped back and looked at the full picture. And in the last 12 to 18 months in my business, we've actually started planning things out months to a year in advance. And it has been a total game changer. Because I have a team now, I have to make sure that my team knows what's going on. So I won't sit here and say, oh my gosh, everything is planned so meticulously, down to the letter, that we just wake up and follow the plan every single day. Absolutely not. There's still things that change and ebb and flow.
And I think that's what's so important to me about planning, is that it is this opportunity to create a vision of what you want, but it doesn't have to be so static. It's almost like a mirage. You see it, you can visualize it, but when you get there, it might not be exactly what it looked like. So I want to talk to you about how I actually plan out my 2022 by year and by quarter. And to do that, I want to start by telling you that I did create a freebie to go with this episode. If you head over to heartsoulhustle.com/2022, that's heartsoulhustle.com/2022, I have a planner that you can check out that's actually going to walk you through all the steps that we're going to cover today. That's what I'm going to do for this episode, is talk through these concepts. But if you want a place to document it, you definitely want to grab that planner.
So here's the thing. I think a lot of people like me have lots of ideas for their business. You know, we have multiple products. We have a membership. We have a coaching program. There's a lot going on inside of our business. And what a lot of people do is they say, what am I going to do this month to make money? And what I like to do is step back and say, before you even start thinking about what you should do to make money, what do you already have in place?
So my first step in planning out my year or quarter is to evaluate my entire product suite. Now, you might be wondering at this point, I keep saying year versus quarter, what I like to do for my year is just map out what is my revenue goal for each month, and what does that add up to for the entire year? And then I go back and I plan one quarter at a time. So for the sake of this episode, we're going to plan out a quarter, but just know you could go back and repeat this process on a quarterly basis, or you can do it for every quarter at the end or beginning of the year.
So you want to evaluate your product suite, and you want to look at a few different things. You want to look at what products you're already selling, what they're currently priced at, what the current quantity of sales is, and what your goal is for that quarter to generate in revenue and units sold. You also want to take notes on what has worked well in the past. What has previously sold this content? How has this content performed historically? What we're doing when we do a product suite evaluation is we're looking at what are all the options? What could I promote?
For us, we've got our membership, we've got our toolkit, we've got our bootcamp, we've got our coaching program. We've got lots of opportunities within our product suite to promote something constantly. But there's a limited amount of time in the day and the month and the year, that you can't just be promoting 24/7. You also have to create content. So the product suite analysis is about first looking at what has been working well in your business. And I recommend that you take a moment to identify, are there things that I've created that aren't really pulling their weight?
You know, for us, we created 48 Hour Facebook Ads, which was great in theory. We've sold some copies of it, but in reality, we have a new Facebook workshop that generated way more revenue, way more backend offers, and has gotten way more traction. So I have two Facebook offers and one that's not performing. Going into the new year, we're going to get rid of the other one. Now, we may leave the page up because people still find it. But especially with Facebook ads, it's going to become outdated in the next few months. And so when that happens, we will officially remove it from our website and phase it out.
This second piece of your product suite analysis is to take a moment to just write out a few different ideas you have of what you want to promote. I think that sometimes we get so caught up in the, oh, I have to have one core product and one core offer and one way that people work with me, which I don't necessarily disagree with that ideology, but I think there is this caveat to it, which is like, we shouldn't have more than one thing that we're focusing on at a time. We can have multiple products. We can have multiple ways for people to work with us. But what are the other things that you're thinking about? Are you thinking about launching a membership, a coaching program, a low ticket offer, a mini course, a funnel? What are you thinking about doing in the next quarter that you may want to play around with?
And this is just an idea dump. You don't have to know exactly what you're going to create. You might just be saying, I know I want to go from what I'm selling now for 197 to something that I'm selling for 497. And that might be the extent of what you're looking to do at this point in time, and that's okay. The point of this is to just start to get ideas down and start thinking about what do I actually want to promote?
Now, once you've kind of evaluated your product suite, what you then want to do is determine what are you focusing on for the quarter? So my personal philosophy is that for a quarter, I like to have one core launch, maybe a secondary promotion, and time to create content, which is nice, because a quarter breaks up into three months, and those are three things that I'm focusing on. So what I do is I just take a moment to say, what is my primary promotion this quarter? What is the big thing that I'm really going to focus in on?
Like for example, for us, this quarter is all about our membership. We are pushing our membership very hard this quarter, the first quarter of 2022, I should say, because we want to get people in and we want to grow our membership in the next year. The secondary offer that I would be focusing on is our coaching program, because at the end of the quarter, we'll do renewals and we'll do a small promotion for new people on our email list.
Now, I also like to start asking the question, how am I going to get people to these offers? I don't have to have a robust launch plan at this phase of the game, but I'm going to ask, how am I going to drive traffic to these offers? Is it going to be totally organic? Am I going to do Facebook ads? Am I doing Google ads? Am I doing affiliate marketing? Am I referring people into the program? And what is my revenue goal for the quarter with these offers? What do I want to get from my primary offer? My secondary offer? From regular content? From funnels I have running? I like to take a moment to just look at the overall revenue for the quarter goal, based on a major launch, a miniature promotion, and then any passive content that I'm promoting, which would be like low ticket offers or funnels.
And then I just ask a very high level question of, how will I know I'm on track to hitting these goals? What does that look like? So does that look like, oh, wow, really slow in January, really slow in February, and then bam, we push hard in March? Is that a quiet January, a big push in February, and then a secondary downsell in March? How do I know when I'm on track for this? For us, a lot of times we look at downloads, how many downloads are we getting for the podcast? That's something that we like to look at. I feel like that gives me a really good look. And how big the email list is growing. So I'm watching both of those things to see, are they in alignment with what my goals are?
So once I know what I'm going to focus on in terms of products, then I like to say, what am I going to track to actually make sure that I'm moving towards these goals? So I just told you, you know, I ask the question, what does it look like? What am I tracking? Is it revenue, list size, downloads, blog traffic, Instagram followers, sales, newsletters I've sent, ad spend, amount of time I'm working? What do you want to track that will give you an accurate picture of how things are going? I recommend that you always include revenue. It's good to track revenue, maybe even profit, if you're trying to hit a certain profit margin for the year. But you do want to just start asking yourself, what are the metrics that I want to hit in alignment with these revenue goals from the last analysis?
So for example, if I'm doing revenue, blog traffic, and amount of time I'm working a week as my key monthly metrics, maybe I say for the quarter, I want to hit 50K, I want a thousand readers, and I want 35 hours a week. How does that break down to each month? Is that linear growth? Is it exponential growth? Is it one big month and two slow months? You want to just start asking yourself, what does everything need to look like for me to know I'm successful?
Once you've done that, I create what I call an at a glance or a one page view of my plan for the next 90 days. And this is inside that planner that you can grab at heartsoulhustle.com/2022. And basically what I do in this one page is I say, what is my primary focus for the next 90 days? What is that core product? What's the secondary product or secondary promotion I'm going to be focused on? And then what do I want my targets that I'm tracking to look like over the next 30, 60, and 90 days?
So for example, if I was trying to hit that $50,000 quarter, maybe my revenue is 10,000 in January, 15,000 in February, and 15,000 in March. That would be a $50,000 quarter. That's what I would be on track for. If I was looking at podcast downloads, I want those to grow linear. So I'm looking for about 4,000 in the first 30 days, 6,000 in the next 30 days, and 8,000 in the next 90 days.
Then I do what I call my one thing monthly. What is the one thing that I'm going to focus on for the month? And I'll give you a very specific example of what we're doing for the next three months, including December. So December is about the membership. January is about the membership. February is about content creation and building a funnel for the membership. And then March, we'll do a launch. I know that's the next four months, but you get the picture. I'm doing one primary focus per month.
And then I ask the question, what are the required resources? So if I want to hit these goals, what do I need to spend in ads? What do I need to have on my team? Who do I need to work with? What resources do I need? Do I need a new website? Do I need new downloads, freebies, quizzes? What are all the things that I'm going to need? And then I just leave a little section for myself to scribble any notes that may have come to me over the course of creating all this. Because at this point, just to recap, we've analyzed our product suite, we've looked at our key metrics, and we've created just a one page view of everything that we need.
So what I'm doing at this point is I'm basically getting a clear picture of what I want my quarter to look like at a glance. The next thing that I'll do after that is I'll break down each of the 30, 60, and 90 day goals into a monthly breakdown. And the monthly breakdown, what I do is I choose one core metric for the month that I'm focused on. So for example, in January, if I'm focused on one of my low ticket products, my primary tracker for that is either units sold, or revenue, or a combination of the two.
So let's say that for the month of January, my goal is a hundred sales of the low ticket offer. Here's what I do. I break down each month into four to five weeks. It depends on the month. Some months have four weeks, some months have four and a half. So I always just look, do I have four or five Mondays in the month? And then I create three boxes for each day, or each week of the month, I should say. The first box is the goal. The second box is actions I need to take. And the third box is notes about it. So this is very visual in the planner, but I just want you to understand, what I'm basically doing is I'm just creating not a checkerboard, because it's not alternating, but like a grid of the goals, action, and notes for each week.
So if we were going to look at revenue of a low ticket offer for week one of January, I would say, okay, if I want to sell a hundred a month and there's four weeks in January, my goal is 25 sales of my low ticket product in the first week. Action, that means I need to start running ads the first week of January, if I want to sell 25 copies. And for notes, I'm going to say, let's start at $200 a day. That generally, based on our stats, would bring about 25 sales a week, if we spend $200 a day on advertising.
Then the second week, the goal would be the same, because I'm looking at this as linear growth. I want to add 25 sales of my low ticket offer a week. So my second week, I'm going to talk to a Google ads manager, because we've been getting good results with Google ads. But I want to work with somebody who can support us at an even deeper level, run some more Google ads, some retargeting, some evergreen stuff. So I'm going to talk to a Google ads manager. And then under notes, I'm going to write, I need to schedule that meeting and find that ads manager. I need to find the person who can help me. So I'm absolutely going to put that as my notes for week two.
Week three, same goal, 25 sales. But this time, maybe I'm going to promote it organically to my newsletter list. I'm going to put it under ways you can work with me. I'm going to put that in week three. And then my notes is, oh, if I'm putting it in my newsletter, the easiest way to make that happen is to also make a podcast related to the offer.
And then the fourth week, same goal, but this time I'm going to start scaling up my Facebook ads because I know that in February, I want to sell more copies. So I'm going to start to scale up Facebook ads, and I'm going to set up retargeting because over the last month I've done enough that I should have an audience I can retarget.
So that process for all three months of the quarter, and I also like to ask the question after I've mapped it out for the month, what resources do I need to make this happen? Money, team, time. And you might be like, I know, I just answered that, but now we're getting more granular for each and every month. And then I like to ask the question, this was introduced to me by a mentor a really long time ago. It's from the book, The E-Myth Revisited. And it's basically, who do I need to be to make this happen? Do you need to be a leader for your team? Do you need to be an innovator in your industry? Do you need to be more disciplined, more consistent? Do you need to be someone who batches content? Who do you need to be to make this happen? And you're just going to repeat that for months one, two, and three.
The last section of my plan to plan is to just ask yourself some really qualitative questions. And by qualitative, I mean there's no quantity to them. There's no like, oh, I want to grow my list to a thousand. We deal a lot in numbers, but I like to ask some key questions. I like to say, who do I need on my team to make this happen, present already or needs to be hired? So what does my team structure need to look like? So for us, I need a junior ads manager, I need an ops manager, I need a community manager, I need a podcast editor. And we're going into a season where we may even want a designer. Who do I need to be as a leader to make this happen? And that can be a leader for your team, that can be a leader for your industry, but who do you need to operate as to make this happen?
What needs to change over the next 90 days for me to be successful? Are you somebody who's constantly procrastinating? Are you someone who's afraid to spend money on ads? Are you someone who doesn't take time to think through or plan? Who do you need to be, and what needs to change for you to be different? What is a big fear that I have about this plan? You know, I find that just addressing our fears sometimes helps quell them just a little bit. And so just take a moment to ask the question, what am I scared of? Am I scared I'm going to lose money. Am I scared it's not going to work? Where does my fear come from? Because we can't deal with our fear if we don't know what it is. Ask, what is it going to look like, taste like, feel like, smell like, or be like when I do hit this goal?
And this is a really powerful exercise that was introduced to me where you ask the question, basically, what does it look like in, you know, three months, I wake up and I know I did this? Are you on vacation? Did you go get a massage? Did you take a walk in the park? Did you go see a movie without the family or any significant others and just have me time? How are you going to know that you hit this goal from a experience perspective? How much have you made? How many people are on your list? What does your business look like? How much are you working? Get really descriptive, because it's a very powerful exercise.
And then the last question I put in is, I'm committed to this plan because, why? Why are you committed to making it work? What about this quarter is going to just be like, I am fully committed? And committed does not mean it's guaranteed to work, but it means you're guaranteed to put in the work. What does that actually look like?
So once you do that, you basically have broken it down into several parts. You've analyzed your product suite. You've set key metrics you want to track. You've created a one page view and a weekly breakdown for that one page view. And you've reflected on your overall plan so that you know how and why it's going to work for you. So that is how I plan my 2022 by quarter. I like to repeat that process for all my quarters. You have two options. You can set revenue and work backwards, or set goals and work towards revenue and then adjust in retrospect. I personally like to set a really rough revenue goal for the year and then kind of just know what I want to make each quarter and just plan for that. But you can do this a couple times over. Plan for four quarters and be ready to crush your 2022.
Now, for those of you listening who are like, this is amazing, and more, please, I want to tell you that inside our membership this month, which you can check out at join.notyouraveragemembership.com, we're actually talking about planning your 2022 business in action plan. So we're going to take that freebie that I created, and we're going to go deep. We're going to have a more robust version of it inside the membership. We're going to have a training call inside the membership, where we build your 2022 plan together. We're going to have an implementation week, where you actually do the work of building your 2022 business and action plan. We're also going to have open coaching and Q&A, where you can ask any questions about what's working, what's not working, not to mention we have a whole bunch of bonuses inside the membership.
Plus, you get access to all the content that we've released up to this date. So you get access to September, October, and November's content, where we talked about how to grow your list with emails, how to set up your first sales funnel for them, and how to create a low ticket product that you can put in that sales funnel so that when you join in the next 30 to 90 days, depending on how fast you work, you could literally be running ads to an email funnel that sells a low ticket product and be building your 2022 business and action plan. So check that out, join.notyouraveragemembership.com. We would love to have you inside, if you're looking to go deeper on planning your 2022 with support. It's just $49 a month, and you can cancel anytime. Or if you're all in, you can join for the year.
Not to mention, we don't just do cancel anytime, we do a 30 day guarantee. So if you're in it for the month of December and you decide, wow, that was not good, I did not feel like I have a great plan, you let us know, we get you a refund for your month, and remove you from the membership. And we part ways on great terms. We want to make it simple, easy, and low risk for you to be able to get even better results in your business.
So with that being said, this is how we plan our 2022. If you want a copy of this podcast transcript, you can go to heartsoulhustle.com/NYAM011. That's heartsoulhustle.com/NYAM011 for Not Your Average Membership 011, or episode 11. It has been real. It has been fun. I cannot wait to see the plans that you create for the new year, and until next time, don't be average, be extraordinary, and let's crush this next year. I'll see you next time.
