When I was young, my best friend and I would get excited and she would want to come over to my house to spend the night. In my excitement, I went to ask my dad only to be disappointed because he told me I had to plan the night over, I just couldn’t do it impromptu.
At the time, I was irritated. Why couldn’t my dad see my excitement? Did he not want me to have a good time? And why should we plan to have my best friend over to spend the night (she was basically part of our family)?
This same principal that my dad tried teaching the young me can be applied to your business marketing and content strategies. As coaches, we think of hundreds of ways to solve our target audience problems, pains, and struggles. And we want to launch them all at once, with no planning or forethought.
But without proper planning, how can our audience get excited, despite the excitement we have? We just appear disorganized and all over the place.
That is why, as 2019 approaches, we must have a content strategy plan so we can eliminate the time wasters and pursue a few new ideas we have (also sticking with what works, too).
The secret sauce to this success is organized. Being organized will help you build exposure, create relationships, and sell your products and services (with excitement).
A Steady Stream of High-Quality Content
The greatest challenge a lot of my clients face is that they have to create a great deal of content on an ongoing basis. My clients are running a blog, podcast, social media, newsletters, speaking engagements, and so on. There’s unique content for each channel.
When you’re organized, you can handle high-quality levels of content creation for each of these channels in no time. Depending on your marketing plan, the content you’re producing now can go on for months and years to come.
Creating an Editorial Calendar
Writing content has many moving parts and the best way to organize these moving parts is to create an editorial calendar. Once your calendar is in place, you can simply open it each day or once a week and you’ll know what needs to be done. When you have an editorial calendar in place, it’s quicker and easier to write and publish content.
Your editorial calendar should include each piece of content and when it needs to be published. It should include each step along the way to creating the piece, such as planning, writing, image research, and editing. Actually, every single task related to your marketing plan should be on this schedule, including brainstorming sessions, reaching out to people, and monitoring your results.
Knowing Your Audience and Solving Their Problems
In order to produce content your audience loves, you have to know your audience well. You need to collect data about them and use this to create your content. You can do this by conducting market research by polling them, asking questions, or doing further research. You’ll need to have an organized system of gathering and analyzing data about your audience, and keeping in constant contact with them so you can learn more.
The most effective content is that which offers a viable unique solution to these problems. Your system needs to be designed to pay close attention to these needs and challenges.
Seeing the Big Picture
I love seeing the big picture, but my dad saw all the moving pieces (the house needs to be cleaned, the schedule needs to be cleared, etc). The same way your content and marketing strategies need to be run: all the moving pieces are piecing together the big picture.
The first step in getting organized is to review and/or clarify your major goals for the next year or few years. This allows you to see the big picture, which makes it easier to understand how your content fits in and then plan it accordingly.
Each piece of content has its own mini-goal within the big picture. Some pieces are for attracting people to your marketing while others are geared toward building relationships or generating leads. There could also be pieces that are designed to drive sales directly.
The wonderful thing about content marketing is that it costs very little to do. It just takes the time necessary to build an organized, streamlined system for producing and publishing content.
So what should you be doing right now? You should be putting together your editorial calendar (aka content calendar) filled with your content and marketing activities. When you go from chaos to being organized, every piece of content will fit in a lot better with your big picture, which could be a sell or get new members into your Facebook Group.
Download your FREE 30-Day Content Calendar Guide that will teach you the exact steps of putting your content and marketing activities into one planned, organized location.
Get Your Content Organized Today
