November is a time to reflect. We like to take time to look back on our year so far, make tweaks to our marketing plan to ensure we reach our current goals, and identify opportunities to be even more successful next year. In our personal lives, we often wait until the week before New Years to reflect and set new goals. But as a business leader, you don’t have that luxury. We need to start this work early in order to be thorough with our analysis, and make big plans for next year! Many of our November Marketing To Do List tasks reflect this mindset.

One-Hour Marketing Tasks

Set Big Business Goals To Achieve Through Marketing
Like we said above, November is the time for a look back and a look forward. It’s a fun time to gather your team and brainstorm what you want to accomplish and also how you want to achieve those goals. You might use this time to engage your customers as well. In classic business management speak, ensure your goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. We also like setting our goals, and then dreaming big and setting fairly unreasonable stretch goals as a little something extra to aim for. By doing this in November, you can be setting yourself up to get started immediately in January because you had time to prepare and rest in December.

Survey Your Customers
Speaking of your customers, you may want to engage your most loyal customers to help you understand what you want to work on next year. You can do a series of polls on social media, in your email, and set up a formal survey for quantitative data. You could even set up mini interviews with your VIP customers to learn more. Consider specific questions about products, purchases, and “how likely are you to…” questions. Whenever possible, give choices they can select. However, you should have at least an “anything else?” option for folks to leave some open-ended feedback.

Prep For Events
We know December and winter in general can be a massive time for events and all the upcoming mini holidays besides Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years. There are so many opportunities for fun gatherings your customers will love. But we also know that any amount of event planning can take a ton of time, so set aside time to complete some of the tasks related to the events you’re hosting as well as sponsoring or attending. This could mean checking in on your merch stash, ordering more specialty products, refreshing signage, ensuring you have the event staffed appropriately, checking in on food and beverages, and, of course, peeking at ticket sales and doing a little promo if you’re not where you need to be yet.

Plan Two Weeks Of Social Media Posts
Your social media accounts need constant attention so beyond replying to DMs and comments, block time on your calendar to actually take the photo or video, write the caption and schedule it to go live so it’s off your plate for the next couple weeks. We recommend at least 2-3 posts or reels with 5-6 stories on Instagram and Facebook per week, 10-15 pins on Pinterest, 2-3 posts on LinkedIn, or 10-15 videos on TikTok.

30-Minute Marketing To Dos

Send Your Monthly Email Newsletter
Other than transactional emails related to purchases, you should be sending at least a monthly email newsletter that gives some business updates to your subscribers. If you templatize it, it should be simple to create each month and a great way to connect with your most loyal fans.

Check Your Paid Ads Account
Review your Google Ads account performance at least twice a month. You can add irrelevant keywords to your negative keyword list, ensure you’re hitting the target numbers you set goals for, and make any necessary changes to your daily budget and cost per click. Alternatively, you could use this time to investigate what your peers are doing from a paid ads perspective. Or perhaps you just wrapped up a campaign and want to analyze the results to see what you want to test next.

Marketing Tasks In Five Minutes

Update Social Media Profile Bios
We know you see it every day, but how often are you really evaluating your bios, profile images and other static social media details? Check in to see if everything works as expected and if anything needs a refresh. This includes any links in your bio as well as your Facebook cover photo too.

Refresh Your Google Business Profile
While you’re checking profiles, log into your Google Business Profile. Double- check your hours, especially if there are upcoming holidays, and post some of your most popular social media content here as well. Then respond to reviews and add a couple recent photos to your profile.

Don’t Be A Ghost On Social Media
Even if you scheduled your social media content for a specific day and time, it’s also critical that you are logging into those accounts every day for easy engagement tasks. Share your scheduled content to Instagram stories, respond to comments and DMs, resharing what you’ve been tagged in, engaging with other people’s content, following new accounts, and researching trends. You could spend all day on social media and of course we’re not advocating for that, but the more time you spend in there interacting with your followers, the better.

As always, some of these tasks may need to be repeated multiple times throughout the month, like planning two weeks of social media needs done twice, and, of course, regular replies to DMs, comments and emails is likely daily. Even with all that, we try to make these to-dos total to about 10 hours a month so you have plenty of time to focus on other aspects of your business. Of course, there are endless tasks we could spend marketing your specific business, but that’s a different conversation. Have fun!