Did you know that I’m an avid backpacker?
It’s true!
I love getting outside and taking on a challenge.
This July, my husband, Andrew, and I checked a lifelong dream off our bucket list – we went backcountry backpacking in Alaska. We landed in Anchorage, then drove the nearly seven hours to McCarthy – a small town within Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve.
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Wrangell-St. Elias is the largest national park in the United States, covering over 13.2 million acres of mountains, glaciers, volcanoes, and more. It’s also unique in that it surrounds a small defunct mining town (Kennicott) and an adjoining small town, McCarthy.
We planned to stay a few nights in Kennicott at the old mining lodge, explore, and then take a bush plane into the backcountry for four days and three nights of truly off-the-grid adventure.
The experience was unique, and I can’t recommend Wrangell highly enough to anybody interested in a backpacking trip. However, the trip wasn’t without its lessons!
Maybe it’s because I’m a marketer and content creator in my day-to-day life. Still, I kept thinking about how everything about our trip directly correlated to the lessons I preach to my clients at Perfectly Planned Content.
Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to send out a few big lessons I took away from our trip, and how they apply to your marketing strategy. Today, we’re getting started with the basics: how to make a killer game plan so that you’re prepped and ready to tackle your next adventure.
Ready? Let’s dive in!
Thorough Preparation is Key
Planning for our backcountry trip required extensive preparation. We’re talking multiple trips to Moosejaw and our local outfitter, calling the plane company in advance to see if they could provide us with fuel that we couldn’t fly out with, Amazon orders up to our eyeballs, packing and repacking our bags to ensure good weight distribution, ordering countless sets of topographic maps, downloading weather reports, and reading up on other backpackers’ experiences. You name it – we did it.
The truth is that preparation is key for any major venture you plan to tackle. Marketing included!
How Can You Prepare In Advisor Marketing?
Before diving into a new initiative for your business, I recommend doing your research –
- What market or niche will you try to address?
- What sorts of content will resonate with them?
- What SEO recommendations are out there for this market?
- How can you adjust or leverage what you already have for this new initiative?
- Do you have competitors in this space? Who are they, what’s working for them?
- Do you have a game plan before launch?
- Do you have a plan for staying consistent?
It’s tempting to dive straight into the big blue marketing ocean when you first get started. There’s something really thrilling about hitting the ground running — churning out content, posting 5x/week on LinkedIn, or whatever other marketing “to do” you’re focused on checking off your list.
But it pays to prepare. Before you jump in feet first, hit pause and ask yourself: Do I have everything I need to make this initiative a success? Is my strategy comprehensive, or will I be throwing content into the void?
At the end of the day, if you don’t have a gameplan, or a clear why and how behind your marketing campaign, it’s highly likely you’ll either:
A) Burn out
B) Not see results
C) See some results — but wonder why your efforts aren’t leading to actual paying clients
And I don’t want that for you!
So, tell me: how do you plan to, well, plan your next marketing initiative? What steps are you taking to make sure your marketing calendar is working toward your goals?
