I checked the calendar. It’s also 2019.
Since it’s a short week and we’re all discombobulated from the holidays, I’ll dive right in.
You know all those cool offers you got that were tailor-made to year-end? And all those great holiday messages your clients and vendors sent you?
(One of my favorites this year was a personalized video greeting from my friend and my planning ace of choice, Kathryn Brown of Creating Your Plan.)
Those well thought-out, beautifully on-message and nicely executed outreach plans don’t happen by accident. They happen with a plan.
In other words, if you’d like to do a whole client outreach program based on Groundhog Day, the time to get started is now.
(Which actually sounds like a fun hook for a life coach, health coach or anyone who helps people break out of the trap of living the same day over and over… but I digress.)
Most of my clients tell me that they don’t plan out their messaging in advance because “writing’s not their thing.” Or that “they hate spending time on messaging.”
Fair enough. But their risk is two-fold:
The life-changing coaching programs they painstaking build sputter because they didn’t map out a launch plan other than dashing off some emails or making a quick video for their Facebook page.
Then that half-baked message doesn’t have the impact it could because it lands in in-boxes cold. Their audiences haven’t been primed with regular updates that build a conversation over time.
So let me repeat: those well thought-out, beautifully on-message and nicely executed outreach plans don’t happen by accident. They happen with a plan.
I am teaching the basics of content planning next week.
Like I tell the people who take the workshop, I’ve been building content calendars for something like 30 years. And at its very core, a content calendar simply answers three basic questions:
What Are You Going To Say? (your themes and topics)
When Are Your Going To Say It? (your schedule and cadence)
How Are Your Going To Deliver It? (your channels)
Spoiler alert, your channels (Facebook post, blogs, email, Instagram, etc.) are the least important element.
If you’d like to really dive into those topics, and get your hands dirty mapping out your plan with me to guide you and answer questions, three time-slots are available next week:
Wednesday, Jan. 9, 2019
12 Noon Eastern (11 Central/10 Mountain/9 Pacific)
or
4 PM Eastern (3 Central/2 Mountain/1 Pacific)
Thursday, Jan. 10, 2019
4 PM Eastern (3 Central/2 Mountain/1 Pacific)
Sign up for any of these sessions and you’ll get access to all the materials and the recording of the session, so even if you can’t make it live, you can do the work at your own pace, in your own time.
With a solid content plan, you’ll be the one with the cool offers tailor made to the time of year and the well-thought out messaging that you actually had the time to prepare and execute well!