Wednesday, June 10, 2026
Part 5: Build Your Marketing Engine
Many speakers treat marketing like a fire extinguisher: they only grab it when their business is on fire. But if you want to build a well-oiled machine, you have to treat marketing like a garden. You don’t just water it once a year; you have a schedule for weeding, pruning, planting, tending, and harvesting.
Consider creating an annual marketing maintenance schedule for your business to keep you on track and batch your tasks and content themes to save time. Instead of trying to fix your entire brand at once, you tackle one strategic pillar per month. Then, create your daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly tasks to stay top of mind for buyers.
A Sample 12-Month Maintenance Calendar
Listen, I’m not an expert marketing guru, I’m an operational person with a unique “mechanical” mindset in a speaker world full of “creators.” I created this sample maintenance schedule by assigning one marketing strategy for each month, so you can be sure your brand never gets too far out of date.
Month | Focus Area | Action |
January | Packaging & Pricing | Update your fees and bundles everywhere. |
February | Who You Are | Update your one-pager, bio, and intro. |
March | Target Market | Analyze if you’re fishing in the right ponds. |
April | Website Audit | Holistic review of links, copy, and currentness. |
May | Lead Generators | Update your lead magnets online and at gigs. |
June | Video Strategy | Review your YouTube presence and snippets. |
July | Legal & Trademarks | Google yourself and your programs; protect your IP. |
August | Origin of Wins | Double down on channels that actually brought in money. |
September | Seasonality Prep | Tailor content to your industry’s budget season. |
October | Social Presence | Review your social media banners and analytics. |
November | Client Takeaways | Update your tangible takeaways for in-person events. |
December | Editorial Calendar | Create next year’s content calendar by monthly themes. |
The Editorial Calendar: Ending “Blank Page Syndrome”
A 12-month editorial calendar isn’t just for magazines. By picking a monthly theme (e.g., retention, productivity, accountability, connection), you can repurpose one core idea into a blog, a newsletter, an email blast, and a webinar that month that all tie together and save you creative time. This thematic approach allows you to tease future content and link back to previous months too, creating a web of expertise that keeps prospects engaged with your brand longer.
The DWMQ (Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly) Engine
Once you’ve got your annual marketing maintenance plan in place, you also need a plan of attack for the smaller marketing tasks! Again, this is not what a marketing guru suggests, this is just a manageable marketing plan that an operations-thinker suggests. Here’s how a sample engine runs on a specific cadence:
- Daily: Engage on social media. (Comment, like, and be a human.)
- Weekly: Post original content 2-3 times.
- Monthly: A rotating four-week cycle:
- Week 1: LinkedIn newsletter
- Week 2: Email blast invitation to a webinar or new resource
- Week 3: Blog
- Week 4: Email blast invitation to a webinar or send blog
- Quarterly: Host a webinar for prospects
Now, look at what you’re trying to put out there each month or quarter and break it down in a similar fashion. Just keep in mind that you only have so much capacity, so don’t over promise or you’ll be continuously frustrated that you’re behind schedule.
Checklists for the Win!
When you create a checklist for each marketing tactic, like a webinar, that tracking will allow you to know where you (and/or your VA) are in the webinar process at any given moment, instead of asking yourself, “did I send that already?” Below is a sample webinar checklist from our system. It seems lengthy, but it’s thorough and effective!
Pre-Webinar
- Select date, time, theme details, and guest
- Reach out to guest and schedule time to prep
- Write marketing title & description
- Create ad, thumbnail, email banner
- Add webinar info to “upcoming webinars” website section
- Create webinar in Zoom
- Advertise webinar via email #1
- Advertise webinar via LinkedIn #1 w/ link
- Advertise webinar via email #2
- Advertise webinar via LinkedIn #2 w/ link
- Prepare all webinar materials; Send to guest and producer
Post-Webinar
- Download and trim recording
- Upload to YouTube w/ thumbnail
- Upload registrant list from Zoom into “Newsletter List” in CRM
- Connect with registrants on LinkedIn
- Write & send/schedule follow-up email w/ recording link
- Update webinar website page w/ recording
- Put YouTube link in past promo post comments section for those who missed it
- Post YT recording link as post on LI
There you have it! I know it SEEMS like a lot of work, but my promise to you is that once you have your systems set up and customized for YOUR desired cadence and processes, it becomes much easier to know what to prioritize each day, and your marketing engine will continue to bring in new leads while you’re busy speaking!
Read the 7-Part Series:
Cara Silletto, MBA, CSP, has been a speaker/trainer focused on workforce retention for nearly 14 years. She loves using her unique mechanical mindset to help speakers create a well-oiled operations machine and find a foolproof flow that allows them to be successful and still spend nights and weekends with their family and friends instead of their laptops!