Social media, e-newsletters, blogging; most business owners recognise the value of using these digital communication platforms to engage with customers and clients – even if they may not always fully understand the technology involved. They are instant, powerful and highly cost-effective, so how come – many businesses have yet to utilize these online tools fully? The two reasons most often given are lack of content and lack of time.
In fact, managing and implementing an ongoing communication programme need not – and should not – be an onerous task. Taking a strategic approach and creating a simple internal process will enable you to communicate regularly across all these mediums.
Planning and integrating activity will ensure that;
• Your time and energy is used to maximum effect
• You don’t start out with good intentions only to come to a grinding halt
• You don’t feel like you’ve created an un-manageable monster that is always demanding to be fed
Yes, you will always need good quality content to drive your communication programme, but making ‘smart’ use of content will increase the impact of your activity while taking up less of your time.
Get smart with your content
Content is precious and using it strategically will make it go further. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel by generating completely new content for each medium - use your ‘core’ content to feed all the different platforms. Making your blog the ‘key-stone’ to your communication campaign is probably the most logical route;
• Step 1: Create blog posts on a regular basis
Decide how regularly you are going to upload new posts. Be realistic (see below) and try to keep each post to one discreet topic – doing this will make it much easier to re-utilise.
• Step 2: Extract social media posts from blog post
Doing this will be very straight-forward if you have kept your blog post to a single topic and you should find it relatively easy to extract a good number of posts to use on your preferred social media platform. You will just need to ‘top and tail’ to make them useable.
• Step 3: Use links to blog posts in your e-newsletter
Your e-newsletter will virtually write itself. You will simply need to generate an introductory paragraph or two and then provide shortened URL links to the blogs you want to highlight – with a line to introduce the topic. This way, your readers will be taken straight to the area on your website where your blog sits
Be realistic
Often, when a business makes a start at a communication programme only to have it fizzle out - the reason is an over-ambitious plan. Far better, the set realistic goals which can always be adjusted if it turns out there is more time available.
If you use the model outlined above, the frequency of your blog posts will determine how often you send out social media posts and the length of time between newsletters. A typical example might be;
• Blog post= bi-weekly (generates 20 tweets)
• Tweets = 2 per day
• Newsletter = bi-monthly (links to 4 blog posts)
Plan ahead
While your content will be informed by current topics and there will always be issues you will want to introduce last-minute, having a plan of non time-sensitive topics will make your life a lot easier. Try and plan ahead at least 3 months.
Stick to your schedule
Always keep to the schedule you have set yourself – slippage and erratic frequency will be noticed by your readers. Using tools to automatically schedule in advance means it is possible to make best use of any time you have available and will make it far less likely that you will deviate from your plan.
