Do you have a plan for your social media, email marketing, or blog posts?

Or are you just creating content as inspiration strikes? While waiting for the muses to motivate your content creation is an avenue you can go down, with a little planning you can be much more effective at telling your story online.

In your business, would you go into a new project without a plan for the goals you hope to achieve? Most companies spend time carefully planning out projects, and not just jumping into something new without thinking. Planning your digital presence deserves the same mental energy as a new project. The best way to plan it out is to create a formal editorial calendar.

An editorial calendar is a simple spread sheet, planning out what content will be posted online and on what day of each month.

It is a blue print for how you will tell your company story digitally over the next week, month, quarter or even full year.

One tip is to keep track of local events in your community, holidays, and obscure events that relate to your business.  Do you know when #SocialMediaDay is? How about National Relaxation Day or National Hug Your Boss Day?

Major holidays: New Year’s Eve, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, etc are easy to remember. Everyone talks about them! It can be very easy to cut through what everyone else is doing by strategically planning blogs, emails, and social media posts and noting important dates in state and local history.

Monthly or seasonal events for your industry are important to keep track of as well. If you are in the fitness industry, you probably will have a spike right after the first of the year. If you own a retail business, there are typically peaks and valleys throughout the year. You may have these time periods in your head, but you can be much more effective in planning out your strategy when you actually write them down.

Your Editorial Calendar does not take very long to perfect.

1. What platform will benefit you the most: blog content, email newsletters, social posts, or a combination of everything? Start by focusing on what platforms to need to utilize.
2. Do a little research about local events, fun or main stream holidays, or other red-letter days that will benefit your business. There are many websites that list out more holidays than you will know what to do with.
3. Create the content you need. Write the blog, design the social media post, schedule to email to be sent.

Using the blue print that is an editorial calendar can help you be more strategic with your online presence throughout the year. You can get a leg up on the competition by having fun content that promotes your business as well as serious content. With a little planning you can elevate you online presence exponentially.

The Crouch Group can help you to plan your 2018 Editorial Calendar and to implement digital and traditional marketing strategies that will help your business grow in 2018.  Call us today at 940-383-1990 and let’s get started!

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