How to Align Making Your Content Calendar and Promotional Calendar
Guest Blog by Monica Miller
Let’s begin matching your content calendar and your promotional (“marketing”) calendar now that you’re a pro at creating a content calendar.
Your content and marketing plan are like a married couple: they are one, and inseparable. Once you have a content plan that is in alignment with your promotional calendar, you’ll be able to effortlessly warm up your audience with helpful content that leads them directly into your promotion or launch.
Here’s an example on how to do this: Let’s say you’re planning to launch your book. If you want your audience to get excited about your book, then you need to begin creating content around your book launch weeks or even months beforehand. That way, when you mention that you’re having a book coming out, they will be perfectly primed for it.
Here’s how you can do it:
First, pick out a few promotions that you want to do over the next 90 days. This could be a webinar, running a flash sale, or announcing your online course.
Next, list out all the steps that a prospect will need to take before they will say “yes” to your promotion.
Let’s look at an example: Say you are launching an online course about productivity. Your content should also be on the topic of productivity and your onboarding a prospect may look like this:
Now it’s time to put all of your action steps into a 90 day marketing calendar. One way I like to do this is by seeing my sales funnel as a whole and then breaking down activities into monthly action steps. Finally, I turn them into weekly activity so I don’t get lost into overwhelm. Your marketing calendar should include your content calendar piece as well.
Tips to Gaining Additional Visibility:
While your content is at work, here are great places to get leads for your lead magnet:
- Guest blog posting
- Guest Podcasting
- Speaking
- Hosting live events
- Promote your lead magnet on Facebook groups
Launch Time
Launch time is when you’re going to be promoting your online course like crazy! Your blog posts and social media will be buzzing about your course, and your emails will be getting your list excited about the course as well.
This is the time to really be engaging and getting out to talk about your course so you can reap the benefits of all your hard work.
Review, Revise, Repeat
In these last few blog posts, I have you why you need a content calendar, how to create a content marketing strategy that works, and aligning your content calendar with your promotional calendar to make the most of your content marketing campaigns.
So what’s next?
Review
Pick a date near the end of your 90 day period to review. Reviewing what your quarter looked like will help you to answer the tough questions, like:
What worked well?
What didn’t work?
What could I have been done better?
What lessons did I learn?
No matter if your promotion was a flop or a success, you are in the process of learning and growing. It takes time. The only way you’re going to learn is to review your progress.
Revise
After taking time to review, now it’s time to revise your content and promotional calendars. If something didn’t work so well, what could you do differently next time? If something did work well, do it again (or how can you do it even better?)!
Perhaps you need to do more market research, or you need to gather a few affiliates next time. Maybe you want to guest post more, or start promoting your lead magnet sooner.
Whatever the case may be, now is your chance to reset and get a fresh new start.
Repeat
Then, repeat the process outlined in this guide for the next 90 day period. What are your new content marketing goals and promotions that you want to accomplish in the next quarter? The possibilities are limitless!
Begin planning your content calendar by downloading the Ultimate Content Calendar by clicking here! However, if you want someone to guide you through how to create a content calendar with promotions in mind, check out my video that walks you through the ins and outs of creating your first content calendar by clicking here.
Author Bio: Monica Miller is an International Speaker and Writer, Author and Coach. She lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming, with her husband, Nathan, and their son, Anthony. Coaches, Speakers, and Authors hire Monica Miller to articulate their message into profitable content because she has found that many are at a loss on where to begin so they end up stuck and stagnant in their content. Learn more about her at www.monicawrites.com.
