In the last two blogs we focused on easy ways to keep your website fresh and ensure your social media and marketing execution continues while you’re on vacation. That sounds great; however, you need to back up a couple of steps … what are you actually going to put into the marketing automation tool?
This all important step is the key to making sure you’re always in-market. How can you produce the right messages if you don’t know…
- to whom you’re marketing to,
- what they want to read,
- where you’re going to source it and
- how you’re going to make it relevant?
It is very important to think about the people who are coming to your website, how you’re going to appeal to them, what your follow up mechanism is, and what content you have available to address that need.
I recommend that you start with a simple spreadsheet. We call this ‘the editorial calendar’. This sounds overwhelming but if you just set aside 2 hours with your content contributors (sales, marketing, business owner) and map this out on a whiteboard, you will have invested your time well. An editorial calendar helps your formulate your story, by month, that your prospects want to hear. It helps you organize your thoughts, your messages, your calls-to-action, your social posts and your blogs. Do yourself a favor and map out your calendar for 12 months so you’re constantly in-market with the help of marketing automation.
So, where do you start?
At a high level, map your content out by month. Once you’ve got the high level topics filled out, you should outline the 3 top pain points you are solving with your solution. Those pain points become blog topics out of which you will formulate your social posts. You can construct your emails from a combination of the blog topics and pain points.
The calls-to-action for these are probably going to be THE most challenging pieces to find. If your software publisher does not have anything relevant you may have to purchase them from an association, an industry analyst, create your own content, or outsource the creative process. Next up … quick ways to compelling blog content.
