4 Tips to Organize Your Content Marketing and Social Media Efforts
There is an overwhelming amount of new marketing content online every day, whether it be delivered on a blog, social media, an infographic, in a newsletter, etc. As a marketer today, you need to stay on top of the new trends and findings, and be in the know about new marketing tactics and softwares, and figure out how best to digest and deliver new content. Maybe you're also responsible for creating new content for your company, implementing new marketing strategies, monitoring 10 social feeds or more, replying to, commenting on and pushing out new updates, and then remembering to follow up on all of your efforts. Hey, what about that participant list from the last webinar? Clearly, marketers have many responsibilities and they are usually going 100 different directions at once. I haven’t scientifically tested this but, I hypothesize that their heads would spin if they did not organize their efforts, and I know it's always easier said than done.
Therefore, the following are 4 tips to organize your marketing efforts that you can easily implement sans the head spin.
1.) Block out the first hour of your day and dedicate it to finding new content.
Every morning after I get into the office I quickly scan my emails to make sure there are no fires, close all of my crazy calendar reminders, and shut down every other distraction. I take this hour, without distraction, and go through my list of blogs, websites, company sites, LinkedIn groups, and other social media, and only look for new content to share with my audience. If you do not clear yourself of distractions, this might happen… “Oh hey it's Rick's birthday today! I'll just quickly write Happy Birthday on his wall…” if that’s the case then this task will take way too long to accomplish and won't be worth the amount of time. Find all of the new trending articles in this hour and queue them up for the rest of the day. Social sharing; check!
2.) You should be friends, not enemies, with your calendar.
I not only use my calendar to schedule meetings and block out allotted amounts of time for work, but I also use it as a reminder tool. If you have an event, webinar or are releasing content, as you already know, you need to follow up in some way shape or form. Try using your calendar to not only block off time for the launch but at the same time fast forward a few weeks and make sure you schedule time for a direct follow up. Every release will require some sort of follow up, so you should always schedule both the release and follow up at the same time. Therefore, after you've pulled off a productive webinar and the chatter has died down, you don't have a melt down when someone casually asks how many leads did we get from that webinar, all because you forgot to follow up. Oops! This helps to keep a balance, and even if you don't know when you need to follow-up still book some time on your calendar as a reminder. Follow ups; done!
3.) Social. Where to start?
There are 101 ways to "organize and optimize" your social accounts, so I'm not going to waste time on "best practices" except for sharing one useful tip. I use HootSuite's bulk scheduling feature for all posts/tweets that I can do ahead of time. For example, if we're releasing a new guide, I won't waste my time every day tweeting and posting the new content. Instead, I plan out a half hour and insert all of my updates into an excel sheet, "upload" them to Hootsuite, then monitor the responses as it automatically publishes at the optimal time. As for new content to share, schedule all of it after the blocked hour in the morning. Therefore, you have all of your information hitting different medias throughout the day, and now all you have to do is monitor. Again, use the first hour of your day to look for new content and share, then schedule a half hour every week to update your excel sheet to upload into HootSuite for the upcoming week. New content added to your marketing mix; next!
4.) Content Calendar.
Every month I create a calendar in a word document and track all notable content and associated actions such as email reminders within that single calendar. I know some people prefer to digitally host a content calendar, but what works for AG is creating a single word doc then digitally share it amongst everyone. I like keeping it separate from digital work calendars because I want to make sure this calendar clear of clutter, noise, and I would not want events on the digital calendar to be mistaken for personal ones. I also enjoy having the layout in such a way where we can see every day of the month on one page, so we can view the bigger picture easily. I note when we release a white paper, case study, when we schedule a webinar, and more importantly I also track when I plan on sending emails for each and every action. This way the marketing department can clearly see when everything is being pushed live and also when we are notifying our audience of each event. We try not to bombard our audience with a webinar email, our newsletter email, and a follow up email all within a single day or week; we are mindful of what we send and when. Having all of this information on one calendar helps with scheduling and timing, ultimately organizing a month worth of marketing efforts all within one place.
There is a lot of effort and scheduling that goes into upholding a successful marketing strategy and I know at times there can be marketing overloads so I hope these tips help organize your work and help to give you a breather! What other tips can you offer to help marketers organize their workloads?