Consistency with your marketing efforts starts with a content marketing and an editorial plan

Are you creating valuable content with authentic brand storytelling to attract, educate and nurture customer for increased sales? Before you start social posting, email marketing, PR and sales pitches, I believe that content marketing plan should come first.

Social advertising and marketing are becoming less and less effective by the minute; as a forward-thinking marketer and business owner, you got to find a better way. Virality with brand storytelling is almost mainstream now and if you have not caught up with word-of-mouth marketing through social media, events and develop advocates to help you create the fiery momentum in your business, then now is the time to get cracking and really strategise and build your marketing actions around it.

Instead of pitching your products or services, you are providing truly relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve their issues, and offer them valuable content that nurtures their buying journey.

For me, as a dance teacher, and digital marketing trainer with a digital agency. These two business endeavours are very distinct and delivery a very separate brand story, but my values are similar. To help my community build dance and business confidence.

For each of them, I create a content marketing plan and a brand story to help my audience connect with me and also the valuable journey unfolds with creativity and excitement. As much as possible I try to produce content in collaboration with my audience. An example is a short video below from a survey through social media on what they like most and about coming to dance classes and favourite moments captured that is outside of dance classes. I use their words, created this collage and short impactful video in a minute. I then use this in our social media posts and campaigns to outreach for new prospect within the similar interest and seeking those values and experience.

So here are the 3 key benefits if you employ content marketing well:

1. Increased brand and service awareness to attract customers right for you. This means higher value transactions and relationships.

2. Cost savings: Less spend on non-targeted advertising and promotions and less time spent on inquiries as people already build a trusted relationship with you online. You do need to follow through to deliver the expected service experience well

3. Better customers who have more loyalty: Acquire desirable customers that buy into the vision and valuable relations with you and your enterprise promise.

Editorial calendars can be useful for a range of content marketing tasks.

• Can be used to help guide customers through complex buying cycles.
• Can be used to manage the process of scaling content marketing for use in different geographic regions.
• Can be used to align all the content-related efforts of the various teams operating across an enterprise.

Sharing your content calendar with your sales, marketing, HR, public relations, or other business partners and team members can make it easier for them to understand your efforts – and to alert your team when they are involved in an upcoming event that might inspire new content ideas.

Here is an example of an editorial planning template the I use for my business and help my clients to update and create theirs too.

Get your own content marketing and editorial planning tool.

I create content marketing plans with entrepreneurs and their team who want to grow their visibility and brand story online. We workshop your content marketing editorial plan with a planning tool that includes generating topics that matter, content format, which will flow through to your social media plans on what to posts, campaign and email marketing. I recommend you to start planning your content strategy and map it out well with your buyer’s journey as your starting point, so the rest can flow from there.

If you have any question and would like to create a consistent and valuable plan for your business, do get in touch. I work best with wellness driven, innovation focussed businesses with positive environmental causes.

Find out about our NZTE co-funded training programs.
New Zealand businesses that are GST registered could potentially qualify up to 50% funding for training and development for digital marketing.