Online Marketing and Social Media Strategy

You need to plan your Marketing.

Now is the time to be looking at your Calendar and start planning out some of your main topics and newsletter articles. Which also should lead to your online and social media marketing content.

(By the way if it doesn’t, you need a marketing strategy session with me as you are wasting precious time.)

Doing this seems like a big chore to most people – but it doesn’t have to be. Keep it simple and it will be much easier to start and finish.

Having a plan keeps you from going about your marketing in a haphazard and reactive way. This is the main cause of wasted time doing marketing.

If you want a ready made content planner that helps you plan out an entire year of content, check out the Pepper It Marketing Content Planner. It will save you a ton of time and has over 500 posts you can copy and paste to use as your own.

By filling these out, you will have a plan that can be done in a very simple way by following these steps:

Pull out the actual calendar (or Word doc) and look at the year. Fill in any events, conferences, special dates (days of the year) and other business milestones you have planned or want to plan.
Copy this info to Column 2 of the Marketing Calendar for each month (if you have more than one event in a month, then add a row or rows to that month.)
In the top column, edit the marketing info to fit your business marketing plan. (If you do newsletters/blog/social willy-nilly … now is the time to grow up a little, cross your terror barrier and create a schedule!) So input newsletter, blog, events, etc. for your new plan.)
Look at the events and the market time and now we will fill it in. Depending on the event (and if you need to promote for sales or just show up) where you will place that info under news/blogs.
Once you have the news topics in your marketing plan, you can use them under the blogs and social media as well.
Think about the event. Is there a main topic/phrase or a few? Is there a hashtag already out there? These words become your keywords for that event/promo. When creating your content, you will want to include these keywords into your copy, the newsletter article, the blog and the social media updates.
Is there (or will there be) a special website or url to promote this? If so, record it in that column.
Repeat and do this for the entire year. (Some people may not know the full year – but do what you do know as of today.)
Now look at the next 3 months and see what’s happening, and fill in those areas for those 3 months.
You now have a base marketing calendar to use for the next 3-4 months. This should guide you in the information to include in your email marketing, blogging and social media

Having this calendar will help you better plan your content and marketing and save time on figuring out what to write and talk about!

Kathy Colaiacovo

Online Marketing with IMPACT so you Get Clients! My passion is helping to guide people just like you, dietitians, coaches and service based business owners, who are often frustrated with all the advice and ideas out there and all the wasted time spent on marketing that gets you nowhere. Check out all the free resources on my Pepper It Marketing website, especially this guide for Online and Content Marketing. I also offer several self-study training programs to help you get more traffic to your website, more leads on your email list so you can make More Sales!