30 Apr Marketing Drafting: The Fourth Step In Marketing
By: Julie Goode
You’ve brainstormed, performed market research, and developed a budget … now what comes next?
The next and fourth step is to start drafting your marketing campaign. It is important to plan everything out so it performs smoothly.
Keep reading for what we recommend in your drafting stage:
Delegation
You’ll want to establish who will be the person on your team to perform the various marketing tasks, also called: delegation. Of course, this may change- but drafting out ideas needs to be honed into one or two people. Too many chefs in the kitchen is definitely a thing!!
Consider who they’ll report to
Now that you’ve delegated someone to implement your marketing, consider who they’ll report to, what that process might look like, and help them establish expectations. They may need to run ideas for hiring by Human Resources. They might need to reach out to the website designer for edits. Do you want this person reporting every step of their day back to you? (The answer is no here, no one wants to do this- trust us)
Set up a weekly one-on-one with this individual to go over roadblocks, help where they need it, and be open to their leadership!
Where are you drafting?
It is important to house all of your ideas in one place to stay organized. A program that we recommend for drafting is Basecamp. Basecamp is a website where you can plan, organize, and collaborate with others on any project you are working on. At our agency, we absolutely love this program and use it daily to create monthly content calendars for our clients.
Here is a demo where we explain more in-depth what the program is and how to use it: https://fb.watch/j-HHOVJl9a/
Weekly post schedule
Creating a weekly post schedule or template will make your life so much easier. This way, you don’t have to think of completely new topics to talk about. Note: you do NOT need to post every day to be successful.
Here are examples of daily prompts you can use for social media posts:
Noting the big boulders in your company
What are the big boulders of campaigns for your company? Is there a big event you host each year? Or are there quarterly events you want to drive traffic to? These are important to mark when drafting your social media posts or your marketing as a whole.
Plug those into the calendar, then work backward. For example, if you host a huge Independence Day sale, you know you’ll need to ramp up to that at least 30 days ahead of July 4th. Lay out when you want email newsletters to go out, and what are the deadlines for ad copy, photos, and videos. Working on your company’s big boulders like this will help you master your marketing!
Stock images
Do you freak everyone you work without when you pull out the camera to take photos and videos for posting? We totally get it. There are folks who are camera shy and some who thrive off of being the star of the show. Consider mixing in stock images that are on brand with your company to help offset the freakout.
Our recommendations for stock images:
-Canva
-Unsplash
-Pixabay
Hiring a graphic designer
Drafting out your marketing ideas and need graphics to go with those posts but just don’t have the time to sit down and learn design? Trust a pro!! It’ll save you loads of time and they’ll stay on brand for your company images so things don’t look messy.
Creating within the platform
Our biggest tip when drafting out your ideas is to consider creating them WITHIN the platform you intend to post them on. Let’s take these Reels everyone is posting…
When on the Instagram app, lay out how you want to post it then hit save as draft once you’ve hit your creative wall. You can come back to it and post it when you’ve made all your edits!
Images vs. videos
What percentage of your posts are images versus videos?
When drafting out your marketing ideas, mark which ones you want to create a video for versus posting a photo or graphic. This will help you schedule the time in advance needed for creating the content.
A nice goal would be at least one video per week. We’ve found this to be the most comfortable for those just developing a social media marketing strategy. Check out Lindsey’s video on this, including a fun blooper: images versus videos.
Ghostwriting
As a business owner, this may seem very stressful to consider these steps. That’s why you may want to consider hiring a business, like ours, to ghostwrite content for you. At our company, we would draft out the verbiage, graphics, or photos for your content, and then all you would have to do is schedule or manually post it out. Email us to set up a complimentary consult to learn more: Info@Germono.com.
Holidays
Did you know there’s pretty much a holiday for every single day of the year? Consider researching holidays and then drafting out days that make sense for your business.
For example, July 16th is National Ice Cream Day, you could:
- Restaurant? Offer a free ice cream dessert with any entrée then mark dates for you to post out ahead of time to get that foot traffic in. Create a Facebook event for it to maximize the marketing!
- Ice cream shop? offer kids under the age of 13 free ice cream all day. See the above tips for posting ahead of time and creating a Facebook event.
- None of the above but still want to eat ice cream? Treat your staff to an ice cream party and post photos on social media.
Marketing drafting can be tedious, so if you have any questions, email us at info@germono.com, we are always happy to help.
Follow us on social media as well! We post in-depth videos and explain how to use social media platforms to grow your business.
