At Knowmad, I’m solely responsible for our marketing. I have help, of course, but I’m the person that makes the marketing happen. I used to get stressed about taking vacations because, without me, our marketing would come to a dead halt.
It’s critical for us to be consistent in our marketing efforts because when we stop marketing, sales will soon slow. The result is unpredictable sales, cash flow challenges and a lot of stress. Our friend Ian Farmer, at Ian Farmer Associates, calls this “eating your sales pipeline”.
As a Web Agency, most of our marketing is done online. If you’ve done any online marketing at all, you know how much work it can be. While blog posts and social media are core tools for our marketing efforts, I’m also creating downloadable content offers, email campaigns and writing articles for various publications. Internet Marketing is complex but it doesn’t have to be complicated.
As I write this, I’m preparing for a two week trip to Italy. During this trip, I have no intention of being online or working. While I’m gone, marketing our small business will continue. How am I doing this?
It’s possible using an editorial calendar, scheduling the publications and automating the releases.
To create consistency, I create a 3 month plan for content. By planning the content, scheduling time to write and preparing content in advance, consistent marketing is a lot easier and less time consuming. This frees up my time, giving me the ability to write about timely topics as they arise and work on sales as-needed. This is how we avoid “eating our pipeline” when we get busy with client work and sales. Vacations or downtime no longer cause marketing efforts to come to a stop.
Editorial Calendar
An editorial calendar isn’t a new idea. You may recognize the concept from traditional print publishing. The calendar can be as simple or complex as needed and is simply a list of releases mapped to dates on a calendar. By laying out the topics and publishing dates on a calendar, our content is consistent and follows a general theme. The calendar isn’t set in stone. It has changed over the last few weeks while I’ve been building content.
Scheduled Publishing & Automation
We use a combination of tools to manage our online marketing, most of which offer scheduled publishing. For blog posts, I’ve scheduled the publish date to match the editorial calendar using WordPress. For social media releases, I’ve used Hootsuite to draft and schedule the posts across multiple social media networks.
Preparing all the content takes discipline on my part. The key is to stay ahead of schedule, preferably by a few weeks. Approaching our marketing like this makes our marketing less consuming, consistent and easier to manage.
Here’s how you can do this too.
Day #1
Create a list of topics you’d like to write about. Make sure to record the ‘hook’, the type of release and where you plan to distribute the topic. I tend to keep this general. For example, ‘blog post’ or ‘social’.
Day #2
Create outlines for the topics. Make sure to cover the main points that you want to hit.
Day #3
Start writing or, if you have a writer, delegate the writing. If you’re delegating the writing, personas and a description of the desired voice will help you get better results by creating clarity for the writer.
Day #4
Add photography to any blog posts to make the posts more interesting to read and test all the website links in the content. Draft releases in software that lets you schedule the releases.
Have you found other ways to make your online marketing more manageable? Leave a comment below.
eBook: Website Redesign Handbook
- The six most common website redesign mistakes and how to avoid them.
- How to accurately evaluate where you are in the redesign process.
- How to easily create an achievable, actionable plan for website redesign success.
2 Responses to “The Secret of Manageable Internet Marketing”
Vic Howie at 10:28 am on July 12, 2012:
Diona,
Very helpful! I see we need to use the publishing date feature in Word Press better. I’ve also recently tapped into Buffer for scheduling LinkedIn and Twitter posts, and this seems to be working well although we just started.
Have fun in Italy! If you have any great adventures we need to know about, let us know and we may want to interview you for our site!
Please tell William hello.
Vic Howie
Diona Kidd at 11:10 am on July 12, 2012:
Vic,
Thanks for the comment. Glad you found the article helpful and thanks for introducing me to Buffer. I’ve been looking for better social integration for Flipboard. I’ll check it out.
William says “hello” in return. Check out his article about his recent trip trekking to Mt. Everest Base Camp. I think you’ll find it very interesting and adventurous!