How I Plan My Marketing Year (And Why It's Not January to December)

If it's August and you feel like you already missed your window to plan the rest of the year, this episode is your permission to start anyway.

In this episode of The Consistency Corner, Ruthie walks through why she plans her marketing year July to June instead of January to December, and how mapping your actual capacity (not your fantasy workload) changes everything about how sustainable your marketing feels. She breaks down the final phase of the Cornerstone Framework, C5: Consistency and Capacity, and shows you how to name your marketing floor, your ideal, and your launch window before back to school season pulls your attention in six directions.

This isn't about doing more. It's about building a rhythm that survives the calendar flip because it was designed for the calendar you actually live in.

You'll learn how to map your audience's year alongside your own, why "projects" (SEO, website updates, brand photos) drain the same capacity pool as your ongoing content, and why Ruthie's own floor is just two things: the podcast and the Friday email.

Join Ruthie at the next Marketing Mixer on August 20th for more conversations on capacity during back to school season. Register at {consistencycorner.com/mixer}.

Join the next Marketing Mixer, a virtual networking event for mom founders. 

Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode, and follow along over on Instagram!
@ruthie.sterrett
@theconsistencycorner

Transcript

Ruthie (00:00.344)

Taking my own business through my cornerstone strategy, right? And I did something with my marketing plan that I have never done before. I planned my year from July to June, kind of like a school year. Not January to December, the way most planners or templates or goal setting workshop tells you to do, but I planned it from July to June. And before you hear that and think, well, it's August. if I'm gonna do that, I've already missed the boat. No, no, no.

This is what I want you to be able to unpack today. This is a here's what I did and why episode, not a here's what you should have done episode. Why I use the planning year the way I did and how you can start whenever to build your own. There is no too late, okay? But I want you to sit with this logic for a second because once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. If you're a mom, you already kind of live on a school year calendar.

Your energy runs on it. Your household runs on it. New grade, new year, back to school, fall sports, then holidays, then the spring sprint, then the summer shift. Like that's a real year. It doesn't have to start in January. But as a business owner, we often think that we have to plan January to December. You can do both. You can do whichever one works best for you. So today, as back to school is right around the corner, or maybe even started for some of you.

Talking about energy as a planning input, how to build a marketing rhythm that survives the transition in season and the calendar flip because it's designed for the calendar you live in. Last week, as I shared my both and summer debrief, I asked you to write yours. And if you did, great, because today is what that document is for. The debrief captured your real capacity from the summer.

So that next summer you have that as reflection. But today we're gonna build the fall rhythm that goes on top of that. And I'm gonna teach this through the lens of the final phase of our Cornerstone framework, which we call C5 consistency and capacity. And I wanna tell you why it's the final phase because the order matters. By the time we get to C5 with a client, the strategy exists, the messaging is clear, the channels are chosen, the projects are mapped.

Ruthie (02:24.29)

The campaigns are on the calendar. C5 is where we hold all of that up against her real life and ask the question that decides whether any of that actually happens or it becomes a strategy that collects digital dust in a Google Doc. What can she actually keep up with? What does she have the capacity to actually execute? Because strategy that ignores capacity is a wish.

It's a beautiful, well-organized wish. So, step one of thinking this way is mapping the year you actually live. There are two kind of overlays to this. The first is your audience's year. What's happening in your market? What's happening for your audience across 12 months? You can start today, you can start it in September, you can start it in December, whatever makes sense for you. Start in January if that makes the most sense for your brain. But

When is she buying? When is she busy? When is she checked out? When is she in fresh start mode? It's all gonna be different depending upon your business. But we we built all of this in our cornerstone strategy earlier in the the campaign calendar. And if you heard my Christmas in July episode last month, you've seen that how we even like applied this to Q4. But the second overlay to this planning is what does your year look like?

Here's mine, kind of high-level overuse so you can see what I mean. August is back to school. It's my son's birthday. It's the early like inklings of fall sports. And it's coming off of summer where I've been at a limited capacity work-wise. And so there's a full month before I've done a single piece of client work or my own marketing.

And because I plan for that, when I'm doing my campaign planning, I can see how my energy needs to shift. And you know, just like we've planned August, okay, now I know what's happening in September, it's a little bit of a more we're into the rhythm. October, we're really like, okay, we're starting to gear up for the holidays, November is my birthday. You get it. Like I'm planning for my life along with my business. So when I mapped July to June.

Ruthie (04:47.074)

Both of those inputs went in, my audience's seasons and my seasons side by side. And then I was able to look at the projects that we need to accomplish this year and start to put them on the calendar and understand how much capacity we have to create content in different seasons. Now, when I say projects, you might be like, Ruthie, what are you talking about?

This really matters, okay? When we talk about social media, and I talk about the fact that social media alone is not a strategy, it's a container. There are other containers that need to be do their jobs so that your social media container can do its job. Those are things like PR or visibility. There's other things like SEO optimization. Those might be things like website updates. Those might be things like a brand photo shoot. those might be things like messaging work.

Building repurposing engines, creating AI tools. have for me, another one is like having a follow-up system with my network. But those are all things that are like one-time projects. I'm gonna build it and I need the capacity to build it. And they sit right alongside our regular content creation. And those projects.

Are the things that a lot of people forget to account for when they're planning out their marketing strategy. When they think about their marketing workload, they're usually thinking about ongoing content. How many posts, how many emails, how many blog posts? But the projects are what help the ongoing content do its job. Right? A repurposing engine that I'm gonna build is why one podcast episode can feed a week of social quickly and easily.

The SEO sprint is why the website will bring traffic from organic search and be aligned with the messaging of the current brand. Those projects take real hours, and they're coming, those hours are coming from the same capacity pool as everything else. So if you make a plan that has ongoing content and three projects and it's back to school.

Ruthie (07:02.814)

Something is gonna break if you try to do all of that at once. You're gonna not get things done or you're gonna burn the heck out of yourself. So mapping the entire year means that I can pace out the projects and place them where the energy can hold them next to the content, not instead of or on top of it. And one more time, if you're listening and thinking, like I I've

There's so much to think about, Ruthie, and we're already we're already at August. Friend, August is the new January. Like we got a fresh start right now. Let's go. Start where you are. Map August to July, September to August. Whatever month you're listening to this in, you could that can be month one. That can even be month zero and you start with next month if that's easier. But what I promise you about doing all of this whenever and however you do it is you're setting future you up over and over again.

When I sit down in September or to finalize Q4, I'm not planning from scratch because I made a pencil plan of the entire year. I'm refining something that I mapped a few months ago. When I sit down in December, when everyone else is starting their annual plan from a blank page, six months of mine has already been thought about.

Now, that doesn't mean it won't shift and I won't change it along the way. That's why I also do quarterly planning to update that annual plan. But having the scaffolding of that annual plan is so incredibly helpful. And the reason that I like annual planning and not just quarterly planning is because every quarter is a runway into the next quarter. So we need to know what we're preparing for while we're in that particular quarter. So we need to look at the full 12 months.

So you've mapped out your year, you've mapped out your capacity, you've mapped out your campaigns and your messaging. Now comes that consistency and capacity question.

Ruthie (09:04.908)

During a calm week.

How much time do you have for marketing? And you can look at this as a week or you can look at it as a month, whatever is easier for you. But what is your bare minimum of how much time you can devote to marketing? And I mean thinking about it, I mean following up with team members if they're doing it, I mean creating the content yourself if you're doing it, I mean these projects that have to get done or need to get done.

your piece in them, how much capacity do you actually have? Right in C5, we're looking at all of the channels that we mapped in C4, which is channels and content, and saying, what is the floor for this channel? Meaning if we are at max capacity, what is our like non-negotiable? We're going to publish no matter what. We're going to figure it out how to make it weak, make it work.

The ideal is like what would happen during that normal calm week. And then the sprint is the heavier volume that we're actually gonna turn up during a launch window or a selling season that then we can deliberately kind of back off from. So let me make this concrete with my own marketing strategy. My floor is two things. The podcast gets published every week. The Friday email goes out every week.

Those things happen in a great week, in a terrible week, in a sick kid week, in a vacation week, because the system around them is built to protect them. And then the bare minimum of social media flows from those two things. The episode gets mined for posts, the newsletter gets repurposed for other posts. So even at the floor level, my social won't go dark. And this is the important part because it doesn't require fresh thinking.

Ruthie (11:03.372)

From me in a week when I don't have fresh thinking to give it. And we're gonna talk a little bit more next week about batching and how you can leverage batching. And I have thoughts on batching. Your girl has an opinion there. but we're gonna talk about that next week. So on top of the floor, in normal weeks, we build the ideal, right? How many posts would I ideally like to put out? How many in addition to the newsletter sales emails do I wanna send?

Are there any times I'm gonna do an email-specific marketing campaign or write an email sequence that might get automated? What about, you know, a launch window? Like, okay, so we've got our floor, we've got our ideal, and then we've got our launch window, which we're gonna dial up the content even more, but we're gonna do that strategically and intentionally, not all the time. And we're making these decisions ahead of time, not when we're like.

Spiraling in our luteal phase, not when we're negotiating with ourselves about whether or not we should skip social media for another week and then we feel like a failure because we did. The floor is like, what is my bare minimum? And how do I protect my capacity to get to that bare minimum? The ideal is like, what can I realistically hit and do? And the launch window is like, when do I actually have the capacity? We got an episode coming for you soon about launches too.

But when do I actually have the capacity to ramp it up a little bit? So the pre-work for this fall is naming your floor, naming your ideal, and we'll talk about that ramp up in a few weeks. Now, let's talk about why the floor might feel hard to name, because I think the reason is that most of us are carrying around a fantasy workload that we've never maybe done math on.

It sounds like this. I'm gonna post five times a week across these four platforms. I'm gonna send a weekly email. I'm gonna write a blog. I'm gonna redo my homepage. And then also I need to rewrite my service guide. and I need to launch that lead magnet. Every one of those sentences is very easy to say. And each one arrives wearing a little disguise. It's no big deal. It's a quick thing. You can do this no problem. Everyone says I should. And those shoulds start to add up.

Ruthie (13:26.592)

And the real hours behind the list that you're looking at is something like 60 hours for the month instead of 20 hours that you actually have. And then you're beating yourself up because you're not getting to it. And this is true whether you have support or not, because even when you have support, some of that still depends upon you. And we've got to make sure that you have the capacity to set the support up for success.

So here's the math that I want you to do instead.

Ruthie (14:03.096)

How many hours a week do you actually have? Not aspirationally, but really. What does that number look like during back to school? What does that number look like during summer? Are they different? And be honest.

What if your client work ramps up? What if it's the holidays? What if a team member is out sick? Those are the types of things that help you understand what your floor is and how to build a strategy that fits into that floor. And then whatever the floor is, how do we design systems and processes that feed it without burning you out?

Ruthie (14:46.882)

And I know you're thinking, like, okay, but when I outsource, like it can't all get done. You're right. But does your team have the capacity for that? Are you investing in the support that can do those things? We got an episode coming soon about what type of support to invest in, and we'll talk about that a little bit. But support also doesn't take your number to zero. It can't, because the strategic question becomes where are you the linchpin? What's the part only you can do?

that everything else flows from. What's in your brain that that support needs to know or needs to have from you to do their job? For me, the answer is that I record a podcast. My voice, my face, in this video, in this audio, it's my thinking, my stories, and it's documented so that my team can use it. My team that's going to repurpose the podcast into LinkedIn content can't do it if there's no podcast. So that's the link, that's the linchpin. That's the bottleneck.

And again, we're going to talk about batching next week and how to protect that floor with batching. So before we land on all of this, one more thing I want to talk about as a mom, that your map, your floor, or your ideal.

needs to not only take into account your energy, but your kids' energy. And here's why I say this a new grade and new routines is a big deal. Maybe we're stepping into a new school, middle school or high school, and big feelings are gonna show up in your house at dinner, at bedtime, in the car, when you ask somebody to take out the trash or pick up their shoes or check on homework. Some of it you can see coming

And some of it is gonna ambush you. And holding space for that is part of your capacity math. It has to be. Because the version of this that hurts is when you fill your own plate to the very rim in August, in back to school season, and then your kid has a hard time adjusting. And now you're trying to support them and pour from an empty cup into a kid who needs you.

Ruthie (17:06.476)

While you built a content calendar that was planned around a calmer life. And so there you are, feeling shame, feeling guilt, feeling like I'm not good at this, I'm not good at this, I'm or you're burning yourself out, trying to do it all. So especially going into back to school season, you've got to leave some margin on purpose. Not because you're planning for disaster, but because being available for the turbulence, if it comes.

Is part of being a mom and a business owner. That doesn't go on our content calendar. It doesn't go in our, you know, strategic plan, but it does go into thinking about your capacity and thinking about your floor. So the marketing rhythm that survives the calendar flip is the one that was designed for your real calendar and your real capacity.

Not January's imaginary year, not the fantasy workload of shoulds, and I'll just do this and I'll just do that, but your actual year, your energy curve, your hours, your true capacity. So you have an assignment this week, just like we did last week. I want you to set the timer for 20 minutes, get out your notes app, get out your Google Doc, and name your floor before school starts. Three things are gonna go on that page. Number one.

What is the one or two marketing channels that you will show up in every single week? Number two, what are your real marketing hours, the honest number for this fall specifically? In a busy week, in a regular week, in a calmer week. And it might be zero. You might realize, like, okay, sometime it is zero.

Ruthie (18:57.29)

Number three, assuming the number's not zero, what flows from what? Meaning which floor pieces can feed other pieces so that your minimum doesn't require maximum thinking. And again, we're going to talk about batching soon, but having those things mapped out, along with the summer debrief that we wrote last week is starting to put together an annual plan for you in the moment.

You're able to start where you are and get this stuff documented so that you can help future you. And you can even help a team member who's coming in and can't read your mind because you've got this stuff documented, right? So like I said, next week we're gonna talk about batching. Why do we batch? When do we batch? How long should a batch cover? How often should you be batching? Because batching gets sold as this answer to everything. And the truth is it's more complex than that.

But we're gonna talk about that next week. What I want to leave you with is an invitation to our next marketing mixer. It's our quarterly networking event for mom founders. And this year, it's or this quarter, it's happening August 20th. And we're gonna have conversations about capacity during back to school with other moms, with other founders who get it. And again, this is all relative, whether you have support or you are DIY.

Because in your business, as the expert that you are, your content does depend on you. Your marketing does depend on you, even with support. So we're gonna have conversations about that. The link is in the show notes to register or go to the consistencycorner.com slash mixer and save your seat and I'll see you there.