Good morning and welcome to the Monday Morning Marketing podcast. I'm Esther.
And I'm Melanie.
And today we're talking about content planning. What is it? How to do one and why is it even necessary?
Yes, this is a follow on from what is in a digital marketing strategy, which we did last week. But this can be done at any time. You can create a strategy for one week to three months. Absolute minimum would be a week, wouldn't it?
Yeah, it really would. You sort of need to know what you're posting Monday to Friday or Monday to Sunday or Sunday to Saturday, whatever way you work your week, whether you're working like going off work week, whether you're going off a calendar week, whether you're going off whatever week that you go off, then do it for that amount of time.
You're one of them, aren't you?
I am. Yeah. Yeah. But for a minimum of five days, depending on what your your plan is.
You've already reduced that from seven days to five days, you know that?
I said Monday to Friday, I said it was possible Monday to Friday or Monday to Sunday. You know, it depends if you're including the,you know, if you want to have your stuff go out in the weekend, then. put it over the weekend.
OK, moving on
Very quickly "laughs".
So what is a content plan? When it's something that's comprising all of your marketing assets, which includes videos, graphics, infographics, everything really photos and is all put in one place to help you create strategy.
Yeah, and your images should be professionally taken. This is one point that Melanie and I really agree on, professional photographs, professional videos. Yes, there are people that wing it and get away with it. But the professional videos and the ones that are thought out and planned out and scripted out do far, much better or much better? Is that even a word? Anyway, that do far better. Far more better. That's not right.
Stop.
They do better.
Yes.
Trust us, trust us.
And now I appreciate that the businesses that are listening to this podcast could be early stage all the way up to, you know, well in advance of being in a few years in. But sometimes you do have to wing it. We do appreciate that. But try and make your images different. Try and look at things in a different way. Always, always get high pixels, high definition, and as a suggestion, use something called tiny PNG to reduce the weight of your images. It makes it load up faster on websites.
Yes. And if you're going to be using stock images which can be found freely and like for free as well as everywhere, make sure that it's not one that, freely and for free, two different things. Make sure it's not one that is being used everywhere. And that dilutes your message as well, because people have seen the same image with your competitors, with people who are in a different field, try to do as many or use as many original images as you can if you don't have a good camera or a good phone on a camera, phone, camera on your phone.
This is just not your day today is it?
It's not really you know,
It's too early for you, ain it?.
It really is, it really is, we should really make it the Monday afternoon podcast.
Look, as a suggestion for those of you that are struggling to stay away from stock images, it might be an idea to look at the stock images, to get ideas and then go and recreate them yourself with your phone or with your digital camera. That way you can put your own logos in. Your emphasis is actually a really good idea to go to places like Pexels and Canva and iStock and wherever else you want to go and grab ideas.
Yeah, yeah. They're a good place to start with ideas. Another part of your content plan that is essential is to do SEO research. So research and see what keywords, what words are working best in your industry and which words are not working at all. And stay away from those ones and use the ones that are working well so as to give your content, your blogs, your social media posts, your everything that you're going to do, your videos as well to give them that bit of a more boost,
Yeah, and it's also a good idea to think about repurposing, I mean, you can produce all this amazing content to go in your digital marketing strategy and content plan, but you can actually repurpose it and it'll be delivered in different ways, at different stages through the content plan. So, it's great. You don't have to keep creating fresh content. You can just repurpose the old.
Yeah. And as we said earlier, you can do your plan for up to three months, but be flexible in those three months. We don't recommend going above three months because it's you know, everything could change between now and then.
Things change very fast in social media. Absolutely.
Yeah, definitely. I mean, there's been updates, there's been things added, things taken away, you know, everything in social media changes, can change overnight or sooner. But if you have a plan laid out for three months, you can move it around, now. I like to work on Google Docs, so it's all in the cloud. I can use it. I can see it on my phone. I can see it on the computer. I can see it. I can send it to my work colleagues and we can all collaborate on it together. There are other people that like to do their plan on pen and paper. There is no right or wrong way to do it. It's whatever way works best for you. But also, if you do it more digitally, then it's easier to move things around from, say, from Monday to a Friday or move it from August to November. It's easier to do it digitally and then you're not speccing and rubbing out and leaving this right.
Now, I completely agree with that, but I do think if you're doing your very first content plan, it might be worth drafting out on pen and paper on a whiteboard first, just to give you an idea of how you're going to section out things. Now, the content plan isn't just images, videos and graphics. It's also the wording that you're going to use, is going to be where you put any website links. So if you're sharing aspects of your website, which would be recommended as part of your content plan, make sure you put the links in there as well. And then any calls to action. So it's actually quite a worthy document, I've got to say. But when you first start, just, you know, it's like a storyboard, I suppose, of the journey of your content over a period of time, even if you just did a week or two weeks as a storyboard just to get your mind ticking over and get things ready. And then you can start. I mean, I, I use a lot of whiteboards, my whole wall in my home office is rapidly turning into a giant whiteboard. Previously to that, I was using Excel and, you know, just pen and paper and blue tack, you know, whatever works for you will work and learn and adapt things to our own needs.
Yeah. And on that too, some people like to colour code. If it's going to be a blog that goes out, then they use a certain colour. So then they're not joining too many blogs together in the one section or in the one. So if say we're going to say an example, if you're posting to Twitter and you post a blog followed by another blog, followed by another blog, then people that are following you may just go, "oh, she's just sharing out a load of her content" and switch off. Whereas I've shared a blog followed by a commentary followed by a testimonial followed by advice that you're giving, followed by something else, followed by a retweet from somebody else's content. Then that mixes it all up. And you can have this all colour coded on your whether it's using Post-it notes, different colours, whether it's using on Excel and just coloring in the different.
Yeah, post-it notes is a good idea actually, for the beginner. That's a really good idea because you can buy the multiple pacs of different colours, can't you?
So, yeah, no, this there is absolutely no harm in any size of business whether you've got a large team or a sole trader. This is a really useful tool to have and it helps you think of what to prepare as well, because content plans aren't just putting stuff up willy nilly is also being as because it's part of your digital marketing strategy. So and remember, you don't always have to sell all the time. In fact, I'd recommend selling very little as possible, try and give away as much information. That's useful, that's supportive, that's encouraging.
Plus, social media is first social.
Yeah.
And then media. OK, so some people say it's 80/20, eighty percent useful information. Twenty percent, sale. Other people say 70/30 just don't have it based more on the sale, sale, sale end of it, you know? Be useful, be helpful. Direct people back to your website as much as possible because that's where you
Always
Want your traffic to go to and whether that's through using a link tree on your Instagram, you know, updating that because you can't add them into the text on Instagram, whatever way. You want to share your website, share it.
But don't you don't have to go. You don't have to go over the top with this, just start basics. Just start, like she said, five days and just see how you can work it out. It does take a bit of time to wrap your head around in fairness, but we hope you found these tips useful. And this is a fantastic follow up to our Digital Marketing Strategy podcast last week. So if you missed it, head back.
Thanks for joining us again today, guys. We'll talk to you next week.
Bye for now.