In a previous blog, we looked at real time marketing and the need for businesses to be ready to response instantly – or almost instantly – to myriad situations. The key to this, we discussed, was being brave and agile enough to seize an opportunity when it’s presented.
An argument for being ready to response quickly is having some room in your schedule to do that, without feeling like you are constantly chasing your tail… It’s about being organised and creating a schedule of content, so you know that you’re in a good place to spend a little time responding to real time situations.
In another previous blog, we discussed how it helps to ‘think like a publisher’ when considering content. Have a balance of different content to share – not all sales posts – and, importantly, to have a schedule. This means that you won’t flood your social media channels with all your exciting news on one day, but space out your content and balance the type of items you share.
It’s about being organised and thinking ahead. While we might be complaining that Christmas seems to start in September each year, publishers – and, indeed, retailers - will have planned for the festive season months before and will probably already be thinking about next summer or even the following Christmas.
There are many ‘events’ which you can base your content around each year which shouldn’t catch content creators by surprise but sometimes do – including Valentine’s Day and the school summer holidays. So, it makes sense to plan ahead.
Publishers will have a flatplan where they can see what stories they are going to use and plans for forthcoming publications. Why not then create a monthly schedule of when you are going to share stories. It’s simply a case of being organised but it will also bring a sense of being in control of your content creation. If you’re organised, then you’ll have more capacity to respond to content ideas which happen unexpectedly.
In the case of some regular events, such as Christmas and the school holidays, this will probably also be the time when your marketing team is short-staffed. This is another reason to be organised and think ahead, so the poor team member who ‘volunteered’ to work during Christmas week or manage the social media channels then from their sofa, isn’t having to create festive-related content from scratch.
Awareness days are also something else to base your content around. Nowadays, there’s a day to celebrate something related to your business nearly every day. Visit one of the websites which lists them and make a note on your schedule of the ones which work for your organisation. Then pre-prepare some content around those days.
As we mentioned before, it’s also worth having a library of content ready to share if some ‘what if’ scenarios actually do happen – such as a heavy fall of snow or the announcement of another royal baby.
Then, if something happens which triggers a reactive campaign, Sitecore can facilitate the ‘story’ being syndicated across multiple channels – including, for instance, the launch of an email campaign. Sitecore also offers its users control over what is published when by allowing the storage of a series of pre-approved content, which is just waiting for a trigger.
If you want to find out more about how Lake Solutions can help your organisation with scheduling in content, then get in touch.