In this episode of Real Talk, No Fluff, we’re chatting about processes and tools you can use to streamline your content planning, content creation, and content publishing needed for your online marketing strategy.
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Episode 16 Summary:
- After you determine what social media and online marketing platforms and tools you’ll use and have developed your content strategy, the next step is to begin executing on creating and publishing that content. Developing processes to do this will help you stay organized, keep from feeling overwhelmed, and make your content creation and posting tasks very manageable.
- Your specific mix of social media and online platforms plus the number of people involved with these tasks will dictate the processes you need to create and follow.
- These processes can include social media post content, social media ad content, business blogs, podcasts, email marketing, photo and video creation, and website updates. They also will involve the frequency at which each of these creation and publishing tasks need to take place for your business.
- To begin, make sure that your upcoming marketing calendar and content strategy are the foundation for any of your process work. Something like a sale, new service, launch, or giveaway can force a temporary shift in your usual processes.
- Understand the order of your creating and publishing. For example, if your new blog post is going to be newsletter content, shared as a link to your social media profiles, used in a social media ad, and then its content broken out into several individual social media posts or videos, you’ll need to make sure your new blog post is finalized and published before you can get to work on all of the tasks that follow.
- Determine who is going to be involved in the creation and publishing processes and what each will be tasked with. For example, perhaps you have one employee who’s great with the camera and also designing graphics to use on social media, whereas another is excellent at long form content and will be in charge of blog post writing and email content.
- Know that you don’t need to recreate the wheel on your content – That post you’re writing for Facebook also works “as is” for Twitter, LinkedIn, your Google Business Profile, and possibly Instagram. And that new blog post or podcast episode? That can be used as newsletter content or one or more social media posts.
- Scheduling is your friend – Social posts, ads, blog posts, podcast episodes, and email newsletters can all be written when convenient for you, and scheduled to publish at a future date and time. This works nicely with our next tip, which is to batch your work.
- Batch work is also your friend – It helps your focus and it is more time-efficient to stay on 1 task for a longer period of time. Creating graphics or writing social media post copy? Create a week or two’s worth in one sitting. Have your camera and mic set up to record some videos or podcast episodes? Record a few at a time.
- Keep track of when something’s been posted/used – This tip is specifically for content that you can reuse. Your blog posts, podcast episodes, service, and product pages can and should be shared over and over. A spreadsheet is helpful for keeping track of this.
- Be aware of how far in advance you can plan – Some businesses have a pretty steady marketing calendar and plan quarterly or even yearly for their business. But others have a lot more variability in things like inventory or enrollment, which in turn impacts their marketing and content calendar. Sure, you may have a process laid out to prepare social media posts for the next three months, but if things are constantly changing for your business, you can end up redoing a lot of the work to adapt to those changes.
Episode 16 Takeaways:
Liz: Once you think through and develop your processes, you’ll find that many of these tips and processes work in tandem. So it may seem like a chore initially, but you’ll reap the benefits of having and using processes in big ways. Start simple by developing just 1 process and get it fully in motion before developing others.
Ronda: This is all really good info, but you HAVE to put it into work. You’ve just gotta do it!
Resources: Content Strategy 101, Social Media Ads, Business Blogging, Email Marketing Basics
Listen On: Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Spotify
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Liz Jostes – LinkedIn, Website
Ronda VanBuren – LinkedIn, Website
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