How to stay on top of marketing and prioritize what matters
Maintaining a consistent message across multiple channels can be a challenge for many businesses, especially if you provide unique product or service offerings.
It can quickly feel like you’re repeating yourself, saying the same thing over and over.
While it might be tempting to throw in the towel and only write, post, or send emails when needed or a few times a year, it’s important to remember that content is often the driver for your brand’s searchability.
Staying consistent with content creation can help your search rankings, expand your reach, and keep you relevant in your customer’s mind.
We were discussing being more active on Linkedin to one of our clients last year when looking at their content plan for 2024 and they said, “I don’t know what to do on that platform or how to utilize it. But I trust you, show me what you can do.”
They went from only posting the occasional business update to posting 3x a week with our content and getting advice and tools on how to share and engage with their posts for the best results.
This resulted in warmer sales conversations and broadening their reach beyond their 1-2 degree connections. They were able to reach more new people just by showing up a few times on the platform, checking DMs and sending a few connection requests.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed with your content marketing or strategy, book a call with me and we can talk about how I can help, just like with our client.
If you’ve already worked with us, it’s no surprise we usually like to start our projects off with developing a brand message guide for your business. It’s not just about our team doing work to set us up for success with other phases of your project. It’s also a valuable tool for you and your team to use down the road.
Our Brand Message Guide package takes your purpose, mission, vision, values, and turns it into a literal guide on how to talk about your business in an effective way that reaches your potential customers.
When you look at developing a marketing roadmap that will guide your message across all your communication channels, you need to consider what you want your broader message to be.
Having trouble nailing your message? We can nail it in a day with our Messaging in 1 Day deal so you don’t have to wait to get started.
While you think of topics, consider your brand identity and visual guidelines as well. It might be helpful to create a document that outlines how your social posts and emails should look to keep consistent visuals from website to email to social media.
Map Content Types and Channels
Identify Your Channels: List the most common marketing channels—email, blog, social media—and their strengths.
Content Types Per Channel: Discuss how different types of content (informative, promotional, storytelling) should be used on each platform.
Aligning Content with Goals: Explain how to align each piece of content with the overarching goals of your marketing strategy.
Identify your marketing and communication channels and their strengths. Some businesses might use social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook for employee engagement and recruiting but don’t get a lot of business through those. Other businesses, like consumer retail businesses, might heavily rely on posting and advertisements on social media to promote sales.
Outline how content should be handled on each platform. Do you want your Linkedin consent to be mostly informative or storytelling? If you haven’t used the channel much before, consider A/B testing a strategy. You could produce very informative content for 3 months and then switch to another approach for 3 months, then compare engagement and results.
Ensure your content aligns with the goals of your marketing strategy. Are you looking to get more reach and engagement? More product sales? More initial calls? Outline the key performance indicators of each channel so you can more easily measure the results later.
Build the Marketing Roadmap
Set a timeline and outline your content plan. This might be for a quarter, 6-month period, or even a year. Try to predict or consider key dates such as when you might launch a new product or have a special sale.
Use that outline to develop a content calendar. Detail the topics and deadlines that need to be met to distribute the content for all channels across your roadmap.
Discuss the message for your content and how you can ensure cross-channel consistency by adapting an overarching message to different channels. What you post on LinkedIn will look very different from what you post on TikTok.
You can organize your ideas with tools like Miro, Milanote, or Trello. (This is not sponsored…although we have used all of those ourselves at various points in time.)
Monitor and Adjust Your Strategy
Everything is changing, and with that we must also evolve. You should review our content’s performance regularly. (We recommend at least every month, if not more frequently, and looking at insights over the course of a quarter can be particularly insightful.)
It’s important to remain flexible with your plans. Like I mentioned before, if you’ve considered A/B testing and have worked that into your plan, great! But what happens when you get to a month of the first plan and engagement is soaring? Will you still test the other method? What if you get engagement, but the wrong kind or it brings in unqualified leads? What if performance is really tanking after your start the second round of testing?
Be ready to shift as you analyze your channels. Keep up with trends, both in your industry and for online content engagement. What’s popular right now might tank in 2 or 3 months, especially on social media.
Creating a long-term roadmap that takes advantage of multiple channels while keeping a consistent message can be daunting, which is why it’s often a task better suited to a team that works exclusively with that content.
It never hurts to try it yourself, but if you’re feeling stuck or would rather hand the reigns to the experts, we can create a tailored marketing roadmap to help guide your business and create content for you.
Ready to learn more? Book a call.