There is no better time than the present to work on your marketing plan for the upcoming year.

One thing you can do in ACT premium is to enter into company to-dos and events to schedule marketing activities.

Another idea is to create a series of activities that enact marketing activities and in the series, assign different components of the campaign to your employees.  For example, you have several activities that you already know you have to plan. One is the quarterly customer newsletter, another is the 3 trade shows your firm attends and third is the annual customer appreciation party. The best way to get this series is to first create a dated, line by line written outline.

In ACT, you open the Schedule men and select Manage and then Activity Series Templates. Use the Create Activity series option and then follow the prompts to add each activity, the date from the start (assuming Jan 1) and then assign each step to the appropriate employee.

I recently found a couple of resources I’d like to share with you.

I found an article on the Entrepreneur website about creating a marketing calendar - http://www.entrepreneur.com/marketing/guerillamarketing/article193446.html. The instructions provided in this article fit perfectly with the template made available from Brandeo and I think it is a little easier to just mark each activity with an X since you may not know today exactly what you plan to do.

By having each activity marked, you will know, when the time comes, that you need to act in order to have a consistent marketing program in place. More than anything this will keep you focused on doing regular marketing activities throughout the year instead of waiting for a slump in sales and then trying to figure out what to do to make the phone ring.