Breaking down your plan into separate tasks

The final part of your marketing plan is creating a timeline of what’s going to be done and when.  And unfortunately, as I’ve learned from many years of experience, just writing deadlines down on paper doesn’t make any of those things actually happen.

Now that you have your mix of marketing activities, you need to break them down into tasks that will make them happen.  You also need to schedule time to learn things you do not yet know how to do.  This might be a couple of hours to learn a new computer programme or app, or it might be setting two weeks aside to do a full course.  Never be afraid of putting something into your timeline that you don’t know how to do yet.  If you need to take on new knowledge to be able to do something, then most likely many of your competitors won’t know how to do it either.  Learning how will put you ahead of them.  There has never been access to knowledge like there is now.  If you need to learn a new skill then the only hurdle you have to get over is the resistance in your own mind to learning it.  Once you do, there are YouTube videos, online seminars, podcasts, books you can download instantly, and paid and free courses to show you how to do it.  If I wanted to learn how to be a vegan cheesemaker then Google has 710,000,000 results waiting for me.  I scrolled for a full minute on YouTube and saw no end to the tutorials on vegan cheesemaking.  Amazon alone has 10 different books dedicated to it.  What a time to be alive!  So, if you need to learn the basics of stitching two videos together and adding some intro music, there’s literally no excuse for saying you don’t know how to do it.

Let’s start by breaking your tasks down.  By this point you should already know exactly what activities you are going to be doing, so take each one and break them into smaller, logical steps.  For example, if you have decided that you need to get a new website online then this can seem like a big job, but you can break this down into many smaller tasks and set a deadline for each:

1. Research other websites I like.
2. Map out how I want a customer to use my website.
3. Break down the number of pages needed.
4. Research available domain names.
5. Find a vegan website designer.
6. Get quote on designing, building, hosting and support for 1 year.
7. Brief website designer.
8. Arrange product photography.
9. Get new founder’s photos (ie a new portrait picture of yourself).
10. Write text (known as ‘copy’) for each page.
11. Create any downloads or extra content.
12. Record welcome video.
13. Sign-off website visual design before it is built.
14. Test website before it goes live.
15. Publicise that the website has gone live (which then has a whole list of its own!).

That’s a long list of things, but each on their own is a very manageable single task.  You could get through all that in a month if you had a web designer ready with a slot in their schedule.

Some of those tasks are also what we call ‘dependencies’, which means that one cannot be done before another item has been completed.  For example, the website designer might not be able to design your website until you’ve had your photography done because the photos will make up a big part of the design.  Or it might be that you are going to learn how to build a website yourself, because of your budget or just because you want to learn that skillset.  In this case you would have a number of extra steps in there (such as including finding a hosting provider, learning how to use a website building system) and you would need to plan time in to allow for those things too.

Be realistic.  The times when people come unstuck on projects is when they seriously underestimate how long something will take or have not allowed for other people’s schedules into their planning.  For example, that amazing vegan website designer you have found might be booked up for the next couple of months.  Or it might be that you know that you can photograph all your products in half a day but forgot about how long it would take to edit and save them all after, so allow some extra time in your planning to be realistic.  If you think photography will take a day, put aside two.