You want your marketing to promote your business so you can get more clients.
Maybe you are marketing but you’re not hitting your targets and have no idea why or what you can do to improve your content.
Perhaps you’ve always wondered how to align your marketing with your products and services so you can get more engagement, leads and clients.
Or you’ve never even thought about planning your marketing so it supports your business objectives and goals.
This blog is for you if want to know how to plan your content for your marketing for the next 12 months.
What’s the first important step to planning your content for your marketing?
Believe it or not it’s taking time out of your business to work on and create your plan for your content.
It’s not easy to plan anything when you’re answering the phone, emails and social media notifications are pinging away…
or if you’re like me and tempted to make a cuppa every so often….
Too many distractions aren’t good for planning.
Here’s some ideas for what to do BEFORE you start planning any of your content:
- Block out some time dedicated solely to this task in your diary
- Work somewhere you won’t be distracted
- Switch off all distractions
- Stop faffing
What’s the second important step to planning your content for your marketing?
Start with your big picture for your business for the next 12 months. Then you can be more specific and focussed for your quarterly content, monthly, weekly and even down to daily content.
Back to your BIG PICTURE.
What’s your objectives and goals for your business for the next 12 months?
Without these you won’t know what marketing to create to help you hit them.
If you’re not sure, now might be a good time block out some time to do some business planning.
What is it you want to achieve?
Such as:
- How much money you want to earn? By when?
- How many of ‘X’ product or service you want to sell? By when?
- What new products/services do you want to introduce? When?
- What products/services do you want to promote? When?
- What events are you hosting? When?
- What events are you attending? When?
- What events are you speaking at? When?
Back to your content planning for the next 12 months.
Break your year into quarters and think about the main things that are going to be happening in each quarter.
- Are you launching a new product or a service?
- Are you promoting a specific product or service?
- Speaking at an event or a guess on a podcast?
For each quarter list 2-3 key activities you’re going to do.
What if I only sell one service?
This method to planning your content has you covered too.
It can be so easy to fall into the trap of saying the same stuff over and over again when you sell one thing.
Imagine your audience seeing the same type of content.
Mix it up and create excitement around what you do.
How to create interest throughout the year for your one service
Here’s some ideas for how you can create interest throughout the year:
- Create content that builds trust with your audience by answering their BIG questions. (Check out my blog How to create content that builds trust for more ideas).
- Create blogs around a specific theme for your audience
- Host an online Webinar
- Host a challenge
- Launch a podcast
- Launch your YouTube channel
- Launch your Facebook group
- Launch a lead maget
- Launch a limited time only lead magnet
- Collaborate with another business for a new product/service or event
How to create your content plan for a quarter of the year
Let’s say a quarter of a year is 12 weeks or 90-days. (I know it’s really 13 weeks but we all need time off).
Each week, create one piece of really useful, helpful and fab content.
Ideas could be a:
- Blog
- Vlog
- Facebook Live
- YouTube Live
- Podcast
- Infographic
And this one piece of really useful, helpful and fab content plays it part in helping you achieve your business objectives and goals you listed in your content plan for your next 12 months.
Over the year you could end up with 48 pieces of fab content you can use time and time and time again to help you achieve your business objectives and goals.
How many types of content can you create?
Your audience is looking for two types of content.
- Content that answers questions to problems they have
- Content that answers their questions about your product or service
- Content that answers questions to problems they have
A great place to start for ideas is your inbox.
What’s the most common questions you get asked in there? Write them down. Look at that! You’ve got content ideas already.
- Content that answers their questions about your product or service
What specific questions do they ask about your product or service?
Again, write them down and you’ve got more content ideas.
How to create your weekly content plan
You now have your quarterly content plan completed. It’s time to create your weekly content plan.
Let’s say you’ve blocked out time to create new content each week that’s really helpful, useful and fab.
A blog, vlog, YouTube video, Podcast etc
You can repurpose this one piece of content.
How to repurpose one big piece of content for a week’s worth of content
The last thing you want is your content to be used once and then sit there to gather dust.
What you can do is repurpose your key piece of content to create smaller pieces of content that you can publish across 7 days.
Here’s how you do that.
You’ve written your Blog.
- Take parts of the blog and turn them into individual posts for your social media.
- Turn parts of your Blogs into images for social media.
- You could turn your Blog into an infographic (Canva has some great templates)
- Then you could turn your Blog into a Slideshare
- Republish your Blog on LinkedIn and Medium
- Record yourself reading the Blog for those that like to listen
- Record a video on the topic of your Blog
- Share your Blog with your email list
It’s worth remembering that it’s worth sharing your content more than once on social media.
How to create your daily plan for your content
Map out the content you are going to share on each platform and on what day.
Book some time to do this in your diary because marketing is the lifeblood of your business isn’t it?
Can you share the same content on different platforms?
Absolutely, you can! In fact, I’d encourage you to.
It may need a few changes so it works on a variety of platforms but yes, share it. Remember not everyone is going to see what you post and if they see it more than once, that’s okay too.
What if your plans change?
Perhaps you’re thinking what’s the point in planning out my marketing because your plans could change.
You’re absolutely right.
They can and there’s a chance they will.
Do you have to stick like glue to your content plan?
No. But you’ll have something to change or tweak if your plans do change and a much better idea of what content to create to meet the needs of your changes.
How to create your content planning habit?
- Block time out in your diary – regularly. It’s easy to block time out and then to re-arrange it when something else crops up.
- Marketing plays such an important role so ensure the time you block out is non-negotiable.
- Have time once a week to create your helpful, useful and fab big piece of content.
- Plan time for your quarterly reviews.
- Book in time to review your marketing so you know what’s working and importantly, what isn’t.
For example, Tuesday is my content creation day.
At the end of each month, I’ll review what’s worked and what hasn’t. Tweaking what needs to be tweaked.
Every three months I’ll have a planning day.
In Summary
To plan out your content for the next 12 months that will help you achieve your business objectives and goals:
- Block out time to work on your plan for your content.
- Have a clear plan for your business.
- Break the content you need down into parts. Yearly, quarterly, monthly and daily.
- Create content that helps your audience with a problem.
- Create content that answers their questions about your product or service.
- Repurpose your content.
- Review what’s working and what isn’t.
THE MONDAY MORNING MARKETING MEMO
Motivation in your inbox
Get better at marketing with actionable marketing tips and advice you can implement each week to improve your online presence so you can get more leads and clients.