Episode 167: Key dates - do you track yours?
Are you running out of ideas for your marketing plan? In today’s episode, Fiona talks about how keeping track of key dates can help and guide you with your upcoming marketing campaigns. Tune in as she shares tips and tricks that you can use!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Importance of content in marketing
How key dates can help you with your marketing plans
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Do you love your business? You should. Right? Well, sometimes we just don't, it's my hope that this, The My Daily Business Coach Podcast helps you regain a little of that lost love by providing tips and tactics, tools, insights, inspiration, all the good stuff to help you actually enjoy running your business. In addition to actionable tips and tactics that you'll be able to execute immediately, you'll also hear from creative, small business owners around the world, who've been able to sidestep the hustle and build a business that merges their passion with their purpose and provides a profit. I'm your host Fiona Killackey, founder of My Daily Business Coach. Let's get going.
Hello and welcome to episode 167 of The My Daily Business Coach Podcast. If you're listening to this in real time, I hope you had an amazing new year and that you're feeling really positive about 2022, whatever you're going through right now. I know some people are in lockdown, others are not, other people might be having their first holiday for a couple of years. So if that's you, I hope to goodness, you are enjoying this.
So today it is a quick tip episode. And if you are new around here, there are three types of episodes, quick tip episodes. They're usually 10 minutes or less, and they come out every single Tuesday morning, Australian time. And then every Thursday, we have either a small business interview where I talk to just the most creative and curious and amazing people from around the world about how they've built their business, you know, why they do what they do. The kind of tech tools they like and a bunch of other questions. And then every other Thursday, I do a longer coaching episode. So the bulk of my work is business coaching. So I dive into an area of business and kind of go deep and give you lots of actionable tips and tactics that you can use immediately.
So today it is a quick tip episode before I get stuck in. I want to, of course, acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians on this beautiful, beautiful land that I'm able to live on, record on, play, raise my children. The Wurrundjeri people of the Kulin nation, and I pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging. And I also pay my respects to any other indigenous Aboriginal cultures, people that are listening from those today. All right, let's get stuck into this quick tip episode.
All right. So as I said, previously, I'm a business coach. I'm also an award winning, but really an award being an author and obviously podcaster speaker, all sorts of things. I have worked with thousands of small business owners and prior to starting my business at the end of 2015, I worked for about 15 years in marketing and brand, and a huge part of that was content. So everything from custom publishing titles, I was the editor of David Jones magazine. When it first came around, I knew they're doing a newer version now God, how many years later? Like 16. And yeah, I worked on a whole bunch of things from advertorial to newspaper columns, to video content, to a whole of things. And content is just such an important part of your brand marketing and your brand message overall. It's usually how people get to hear about you, why they fall in love with your brand and how they become loyal to it.
And they share your content, sharing your message, talking about, you know, your brand's personality and all of that comes out through content. So one of the things that I work with clients on, and especially this is a part of The marketing for your small business course as well. And you can find that anytime at marketingforyoursmallbusiness.com is to think about things like key dates. So what do I mean by that? Well, there's kind of two camps and both of them should be looked at, so firstly, I guess maybe I should step back even one more step in that before I go into those two camps, the reason that you want to have a look at your key dates is one, there may be something happening that is totally, you know, up your alley. It's totally the right audience that you're going for. And without looking for those key dates, you may not even realize that that's a thing that happened two years ago.
I remember I just suddenly saw all these kinds of people posting about podcasts. And I was like, what is this? And I realized that it's national podcast day on the 30th of September. And so it was like, "Oh, okay, well, I don't wanna miss that next year. What can we do? Especially now that I have a podcast?" So that's an example. The other thing that you wanna have a look at for these is not just, oh, you know, what could we get involved at, but potentially where your actual campaigns could run with. So say for instance, you are a business that really is engaging with women or people who identify as women. And you kind of wanna run like a six week campaign and you might end that with an international women's day event, which is the 8th of March. And so you might run the six weeks, you know, from basically now until the start of March, likewise, you may be doing something that, you know, maybe has a sports theme. Here in Australia, September is a big big month for sports.
So you might be like, okay, let's leverage off what's already happening and be able to run a campaign that's in line with the messages that the media are putting out, the messages podcasters are putting out at the same time. So as I said before, there are kind of two camps, two ways of looking at your key dates and both of them are good to do, like, you know, in sync. But the first one is to really think about the kind of key sectors or industries that your audience is interested in and that your business obviously, you know, plays a part in. So say for instance, you are a landscape architect. So you work with gardens and, you know, beautiful gardens and surroundings and all the sort of things that go into garden furniture and lifestyle and outdoors and all of that.
And so you might say, okay, what is my audience interested in? And let's say you work in the residential kind of sector. So you might think, well, they're interested in gardening like outdoors, so you can have gardening/outdoors. You might also have a design. So they're generally interested in good design. I mean, chances are, if they're actually going to the point of hiring a landscape architect they value good design because those people are incredible at what they can do. I know I've worked with some, and so you've got gardening/outdoors. You might have, or you might even have gardening as its own thing, or maybe gardening even sits under design. So let's just say, you've got design, then you've got the outdoors. And then depending on, you know, how you and who your audience is, you might also have sustainability.
So maybe people are really interested in gardening because they want to, you know, have an orchard or they want to start keeping bees, or they want, you know, they wanna nourish their family with stuff from their own garden. And maybe, you know, they're really interested in the soil and keeping, you know, knowing the earth is healthy and all these other things that we should all be interested in. Really. So you've got those key sectors. So in that instance of the landscape architect, it could be design under which you'd have gardens, you'd have architecture, you'd have other people's homes, you'd have a whole bunch of things. Then you could also have sustainability and then the outdoors. So the lifestyle that comes with having an outdoor space, whether it's a tiny courtyard in an inner city area or whether it is, you know, acreage out in the country or a remote part.
So you have those sectors and then you literally just go to do a search on the internet using any one of the key search platforms and have a look at events or key dates. So literally you could put in design key dates and you could, if you wanted to put your city in. So if you're from a big city like London, you might put design key dates, London 2022, or you could just put design key dates 2022, or the whole country. So design key dates, India 2022. And so from there, usually what you'll find is that there's already a whole bunch of lists out there compiled for you. I know when it comes to fashion events or fashion, key dates, you'll see all sorts of brands that will cover all the different fashion weeks down to, you know, the hour almost of what's on.
So you can usually find a whole bunch of things already listed out for you. And then what I get people to do is to think about, you know, just literally copy and paste the list into some sort of sheet for your own purposes, like Google sheets or Excel sheets or something else. Obviously you're not gonna copy their list and then try and sell it or something, but you can copy that stuff in and then decide as a team. Or if you're working for yourself, just literally look at them and think, you know, is that something we wanna be part of? And if we wanna be part of how much are we a part of it, is it, this is actually going to form the basis of a campaign, or is it, we are just gonna mention it on, you know, one Instagram post being like, Hey, we love that Russia fashion week is on right now or whatever it is, but just having those listed out, because then you can take those dates and put them into your, at a glance calendar, your 12 month calendar or whatever kind of plan that you have.
If you do marketing for your small business, you'll come out with a very thorough marketing plan. This is part of that. But so that's kind of the first thing, figure out what are your sort of three sectors and then literally search for the key dates in those sectors and decide if you're gonna be part of them. And then the other part of this, when I said two camps, remember at the start, you've got one where you're kind of looking at key sectors, looking at the key dates, events, anything else that's happening. And then the other part is to use one of the many, many, many, many, many free social media tools that are out there that will literally list out every single national holiday national day. You know, things like donut day, things like take your dog to Workday, which all sounds sometimes a bit trivial and a bit, you know, fluffy, but depending on what you actually sell or what your product or service is or what your brand just message is, a lot of these may be relevant.
Maybe you sell products for dogs and taking your dog to Workday is actually a massive thing for you, cuz you're like, oh, you've gotta get your dog looking extra. So that it's going into your workplace. If you're lucky enough to have a workplace that you're not allowed to go into right now. And so it could really conjure up some really creative ideas for you by just having a list of these. So you can literally Google a kind of free social media holiday calendar. Later, which is an Instagram kind of planning or a social media planning tool has one. And we will link to that in the show notes, it's called the ultimate social media holidays calendar for 2022. And it's got a free download. And basically, that will give you everything that you, you know, a whole bunch of key dates that you might need.
And some that you definitely won't need but a whole lot of ideas that come up and often that can be a really hard thing, especially if you're working for yourself or you're just super stressed or maybe it was just a really tough end of the year, 2021. And now you're in 2022 and you're just creative juices like on vacation. And so downloading something like this might help you to go through and find a whole bunch of things that actually would work really well in your business. And then you can put those dates into your, at a glance calendar or your 12-month calendar and start mapping out, oh, that big thing is happening in September. Cool. Well, what are we gonna do in August to lead up before that thing happens? The reason for this whole episode, really, and for doing this tactic of this tool, really of putting together the key dates is so that you don't get to a month later this year and think, oh man, I wish I wish I had known about that because God that would've tied up really nicely with a campaign that we are doing, or it would've been such a great collaboration opportunity or a media opportunity or anything else really that could come up and help your business get out there a bit more, whether it's awareness, whether it's retention, you just never know what looking at these key dates can do for your mindset, for your creativity and for actually, you know, promoting and marketing your business throughout 2022.
So that is it for today's quick tip episode, it's really about finding your key dates and making sure that you, you know, spend a little bit of time at the early stages of the year. I know mapping those things out because you just never know what's gonna come from them. Sometimes just the most incredible campaign ideas or collaboration opportunities or media events come from somebody randomly seeing that in three months, there's this key date and we should actually do something. Some examples that have worked really well in the past have been national lipstick day and Mac. You could literally just Google that and have a look at it all. So I know, uh, national donut day, especially in the US has done really well for some cafes there. And some chain stores I know here in Melbourne actually, before the lockdown happened in March, 2020.
I remember looking this up and a whole bunch of cafes in the inner city were really getting on board with this sort of saying, "Hey, if you order your coffee from us today, you'll get a free donut" put in with it. And so people who maybe didn't go to that cafe were more tempted to go to that cafe for that day to see. And then, you know, you never know, maybe their whole loyalty changed and they switched cafes. So yeah, it can be really tempting to just dismiss this whole idea of key dates. And like holidays are just, oh my goodness, such a gimmick, but you never know what can come from this.
So that is it for today's quick tip episode, you'll find the full show notes over at mydailybusiness.coach.com/podcast/167, as this is episode 167. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this, I would love it if you could share it with a friend or leave us a review or it on social media and just make sure you tag @mydailybusinesscoach so we don't miss it. All right. Have a wonderful, happy new year. I hope you're enjoying it so far and I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening to my daily business coach podcast. If you wanna get in touch, you can do that@mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram, my daily business coach.
