I have been doing a lot of business planning lately, and I always come back to the same piece of advice – for myself and for other small business owners.
Do you know what that one thing is? Planning!
Planning is the most important part of any goal or strategy. In fact, if you can plan what you want to do, you will improve your marketing in various ways.
You’ll improve:
- your overall message
- your clarity and focus
- your methods of communication
- and even just your habit and schedule
Planning things doesn’t have to mean that you are structured and not able to be creative. On the contrary, actually. You can actually increase your creativity when you give yourself a head start on what you need to do.
For instance, select four topics that you know your audience wants to read about on a regular basis.
Develop categories of content for those topics – four of mine are business strategy, marketing training, finding clients, and goal setting.
Now you can flesh out ideas easily that fall within those four categories. You don’t have to write articles or record videos right away, but you can start to brainstorm ideas that will be good things to put under each of your categories.
Then simply get yourself organized that so that you can easily write content or flesh your idea out when the mood strikes you. Set up folders on your computer with those category names, or use a system like Evernote to gather ideas, or even just a notebook. Whatever works for you is the system you should use.
When the creativity strikes, you can write or record and then just drop it into your ‘filing system’ so it’s there when you need it.
And of course you also need a content calendar – that tells you what content you need and when. That allows you to plan what you are putting out there for the stuff you are writing.
If you do a weekly newsletter and a couple of blog posts and a monthly video, be sure to plan ahead which content you want to use on any given date.
Your overall message will improve because you’ll be focused and clear, instead of scribbling a newsletter article at the last minute, you can plan terrific content.
Your clarity and focus improves because you are narrowing down the topics that you are writing about – and keeping things channeled to the very topics your audience wants to hear about.
Your methods of communication will improve because, of course, you are monitoring what is working for you and where you are getting the best feedback!
Your habit and schedule will definitely improve because you are actually helping yourself to do things better. If you just fly by the seat of your pants, you will find your marketing tasks to be a chore, instead of being fun, connection times with your audience (which they are!!)
It’s important to get organized so that you don’t have to spend hours each week figuring out what you are going to put out there for your audience. Remember, they are all very valuable to you and you want to give them your best stuff all the time. So a little planning can go a long way! (not to mention it’s much easier to outsource the implementation of your content delivery when you have it all organized this way!)
If you want help figuring out where your marketing strategy is falling short, schedule an Assessment and Strategy Session with me.