Today I’m sharing 2 tips to help you with marketing planning + content creation.

Here’s a sneak peek …

1️⃣ – block time on your calendar for planning at the beginning of the month

2️⃣ – set aside a separate time block specifically for content creation.

Watch the video or read the transcription below for more info 👇

I know we are in a crazy chaotic time of the year. This is like a peak time, certainly in everyone’s personal lives when you’re coming up on the holidays and all the chaos around the end of the year. But from a business perspective, it’s also a busy time, because you’re really trying to look back at the goals you had for the year, figure out what you need to do in Q4 to get as close as you can to those goals or adjust as needed, and then you’re also at that peak time where you’re then starting to plan for next year. So it’s just I think it’s one of those times a year where you just feel like you’re getting hit from all different angles. You have intentions of planning and you know you need to, but it’s often one of those things that just gets pushed to the back of the list simply because there are a ton of other things that are demanding your time and attention. 

Tip 1: Block Time On Your Calendar Each Month To Plan

One of the things that I recommend, and it’s gonna sound really basic, but if you get into a regular practice of it, I think it’ll help hold you accountable and carve out some time in your calendar to plan. At the beginning of the month, set aside some time blocks on your calendar that are purely dedicated for planning, and for content creation. 

If you look at your calendar at the beginning of the month, and you just set aside, maybe it’s an hour long block, maybe it’s a two hour long block, block off that time on your calendar, don’t schedule any meetings, don’t do any other work during that time block, but just set it aside and hold yourself accountable to sit down. Shift your headspace from juggling all of the day-to-day responsibilities of your business and leading your team to really look at your planning needs. 

Think about:

-What are the projects that I need to do this month? 

-What are the projects I want to do this month?

-What are the things that you need to do to keep the baseline marketing going for your business? 

-What are the things that you want to do? Whether it’s rolling out something new or batch creating some new content that can support you for the month or the months to come.

Just sit down and really think through… What do you need to do? What do you want to do? And then start thinking through okay, what are the logistical things or the content that needs to be created to support these things that I want to do and I’ll do some separate videos to help share some tips on that. 

Tip 2: Set Aside A Separate Time Block Each Month For Content Planning

My second tip for this is to go ahead at the beginning of the month and set aside a different time block on your calendar for content creation. Oftentimes I think when you sit down and you plan something and you know what you need to do or even what you want to do in a given month, then comes the “okay, now what?” and that “now what” is often where things start to stall out. I see this quite a bit. 

Now you need to create some content to help support that, maybe you want to send out a couple new emails this month or maybe you want to do a series of social post, like showing up on video. But then it’s okay, now either you or someone else needs to help you with the content creation for it. 

I think that when you’re in the planning mindset, it’s a very different headspace than when you’re in the content creation mindset, so I encourage business owners to set aside two different time blocks throughout the month. 

I know that it can get hard, it can seem overwhelming to carve out time in your business, purely to focus on your own business planning and your own content creation needs because so often, as business owners, I think we’re really focusing on what we need to do for other people. But, if you set aside a time block for planning, and then a separate one to two hour time block for content creation, then I find that that tends to be the one-two punch when it comes to dedicated time to not only plan the things you need to do, but then to have time to get into that content creation mindset to either write, copy, create videos, graphics, whatever it is that you need to do, to support the projects that you’ve planned. That makes sure that you have the time in your calendar to be able to do that. 

So this month, I encourage you to take a look at your calendar, set aside two different time blocks, one for planning, one for content creation, hold yourself accountable to that. Don’t let that time slip. And hopefully that’ll help you keep the momentum going when it comes to not only planning, but creating the content that you need to support those projects.