Social media is all about consistency.
But what if the only constant in your life is that you are constantly busy?
Create a Marketing Plan That Works: Automate Your Content Calendar
Hey, it’s Noni from Printful!
Marketing your business can be time consuming, especially if there is more than one channel
you're trying to keep updated.
But you still have to find the time to run and grow your business.
In this video, we will go through the five steps of creating a marketing plan with limited
resources.
This includes optimizing, automating, and minimizing the work you need to put in to
run a successful, year-round campaign that keeps customers coming to your store.
Before we begin, make sure you subscribe to our channel and tap on the little bell icon.
That way you'll always get notified about our latest videos and never miss out on new
ways to make your store more successful.
STEP ONE: NARROW YOUR FOCUS The first thing you need to figure out when
starting up or working with limited resources is where to direct your attention first.
Don’t try to be active on every channel at once.
Be honest to yourself about how much time you really have for marketing your business,
pick one channel to work with and add more when you have more time and resources.
The key here is to figure out where your customer base spends most of their time.
If you already have an email list or a social media following, you can reach out to your
customers directly and ask them to fill out a short survey about their media habits.
To give them an extra incentive to respond, do a little giveaway—everyone who completes
the survey is entered!
If you’re just starting up, you can do some educated guessing.
Sit down and imagine your target customer, what age they are, where they are from—create
a profile to keep in mind whenever you are creating new content.
This will not only help you choose the perfect channel, but also figure out what kind of
content to publish.
For example, if your ideal customer is a young parent, you could try Instagram or Facebook
as your main channel, but, if you want to offer your products or services to other businesses,
LinkedIn might be the place for you.
Keep your customer profile somewhere you can see it when you sit down to create content
for your marketing campaigns.
Put the marketing channels and content ideas that don't target your ideal customer in the
low priority pile.
STEP TWO: CREATE CONTENT IN ADVANCE Once you have picked out your main marketing
channel, you can start creating content—but not just for your next post or campaign.
If you have some experience in marketing, you already know how much time it really takes
to create a social media post or email from scratch—coming up with the idea, crafting
the copy, finding the right visuals, and putting it out there.
If you plan on posting regularly, it may take hours out of your day, every day.
That's why it's a good idea to create content in advance—have a list of ideas to grab
from, and create a folder on your computer with ready-made visuals and copy that you
can use.
Set aside some time each month to add to your folder, so you never run out of content.
You can use Placeit or Canva for your product photos or social media visuals—they have
hundreds of templates that you can use.
For example, you could create posts with quotes from your customer reviews, interviews with
people in your industry or a banner ad for your latest product.
If you feel stuck when thinking about new content ideas, always remember to come back
to your customer profile.
Identify your audience's pain points and ask them directly what kind of content they'd
like to see via social media polls or surveys.
A pain point can be anything your customer has a need for that’s connected to your
expertise—for example, by selling them personalized print-on-demand products, you address their
need for unique clothing that’s made with their personalities in mind.
All of the content you create in advance should be created with your preferred main marketing
channel in mind—if you think your customers spend more time on Instagram, create content
for Instagram Stories or Instagram TV, not for Pinterest or Reddit.
STEP THREE: PLAN IT OUT
Without a doubt, seasonal content can also be a great relief in generating content ideas.
During the time when it’s relevant, it can drive you more traffic than any existing piece
of general content.
And, when you look at a typical holiday sales calendar, like the one we have on Printful’s
blog, there are enough content ideas to get you covered for the whole year.
However, if you want to make the most of your seasonal content, you need to plan your work
in advance.
Planning your content ahead of time comes in two parts - long-term planning and short-term
planning.
Long-term planning
Remember that you should start marketing seasonal content at least a month before the actual
holiday and you should give yourself another month to actually prepare the copy and visuals.
So do yourself a favor and find a holiday marketing calendar with all the important
dates of the year and create a rough content calendar for the year.
You can find a link to the Printful Ecommerce Holiday Marketing Calendar in the description
below.
Come back to your holiday sales calendar once a month and make sure you stock up on visuals
and copy that are relevant to the upcoming season.
Quick tip: Be careful when deciding what holidays you want to target because there’s a thin
line between creating season-appropriate content and content that doesn’t fit the tone of
the holiday.
To avoid misunderstandings, research the meaning behind each event and keep your brand values
and customer profile in mind.
Short-term planning
Once you have your long-term plans set and content gathered ahead of time, you can sit
down at the beginning of each week and schedule content for your main marketing channel.
Decide on the day and time to post or send out your content then adjust your copy and
visuals to the format the channel requires.
This may include maximum character length, different photo and video sizes, hashtags
and other details you have to keep in mind.
Get everything ready to be launched, so that it doesn't require any extra work from you
during the week.
That way, you can use the rest of the week to work on other things.
Most guides will tell you to post every day, two, three or even ten times a day.
I'd recommend taking it slow instead.
If you schedule content for the whole week in one sitting, start with two or three posts
a week and add more only when you have the time to create content for it.
That way your content reserves won't deplete faster than you can renew them and you won't
feel stuck in a hamster wheel.
As for the best times to post, it's better to go live at the time your audience is most
likely to read and interact with it.
If you already have an audience you're interacting with, some platforms like Facebook and Instagram
offer insights on your followers as well as the days and times they are most active - use
them!
If your main marketing channel doesn't have this option, or if you're just starting up,
here are a few days and times that have worked for us and others in the ecommerce industry:
1.
Emails The best days to send emails are Tuesdays,
followed by Thursdays and Wednesdays.
As for send times, you should schedule your campaigns around 10 AM, 8 PM to midnight,
2 PM or 6 AM.
2.
Social media The best time to schedule your marketing content
on social media varies from platform to platform.
On Facebook it's Monday to Wednesday at 12 PM, on Twitter - Monday to Wednesday at 12
PM or 1 PM and Instagram - Tuesday, Thursday and Friday at 12 PM.
It may be the case that you don't plan to be online at those times to post or send your
content.
Even if you do, I'd recommend scheduling everything for the week right after you finish crafting
the copy and visuals, to not distract you from other things you should be doing during
the week.
Some platforms like Facebook and Instagram already offer a scheduling option that you
can take advantage of through the Facebook Creator Studio.
Most email marketing services also offer the option of scheduling your emails.
For scheduling posts on Twitter, Instagram and other platforms you can use tools like
Planoly, Later, SproutSocial or AgoraPulse.
STEP FOUR: AUTOMATE YOUR PRESENCE ELSEWHERE Now that you have scheduled fresh content
for your main channel, it's time to make it work for your other channels… automatically.
Automation is a way to speed up your workflow, making some processes faster and happen based
on automatic, instead of manual triggers.
Marketing automation is often associated with email marketing.
You can learn more about automation and trigger-based campaigns in our email marketing video.
Check out the link for the video in the description below.
However, there are other marketing channels you can automate.
Use services like Zappier or IFTTT to link your main social media account to your other
social media channels.
These programs will then automatically post the same content to all your channels.
For example, if you've chosen Instagram as your main channel that you plan update regularly,
you can use IFTTT to automatically tweet your Instagram posts as native Twitter photos.
That way, your Twitter account will be updated, but you won't need to spend extra time to
craft tweets.
You can do the same with Facebook - both for posts and stories, and LinkedIn as well.
If you have a blog or YouTube channel, you can automate announcements about new posts
or uploads, and edit the language you use when posting.
Some social media scheduling tools also offer the option to post on several channels at
the same time.
Just remember that you have to craft universally accepted posts when automating.
This may not always be ideal for posting photos, as almost every social media platform has
their own recommended dimensions.
Square photos will work fine on most channels, so you can focus on those more when creating
your visuals.
Also remember to write copy that doesn’t exceed the maximum character limit on any
of the platforms you are using.
STEP FIVE: RESPOND, REVIEW, AND ADJUST Just because you have automated posting on
channels that are not your priority, it doesn't mean that you can leave them be forever.
Once you get engagement, join the conversation personally.
Set alerts for any comments, replies or direct messages you might get and answer them as
soon as possible.
If you don't want to be distracted during the day, you can book a half hour every evening
for engaging with your community.
When it comes to talking with your audience, try to avoid automation as much as possible.
Don't automate comments and direct messages, unless it's about order details or other technical
information that people expect to be automated.
Have real conversations with your audience and you will see your following and your profits
grow day by day.
Always stay on top of the news cycle and review things you have scheduled or automated regularly.
This is why I wouldn't recommend scheduling content more than a week ahead - you might
forget about a piece of content that might seem insensitive in the context of the day
you post, while it seemed fine a week or month before.
And that’s all five steps to creating a marketing plan!
You can find a checklist of all five steps and the resources we mentioned in the description
below.
How do you manage your marketing efforts?
Do you have any tips to make the process more efficient?
Let us know in the comments below!