With the year drawing to a close, we wanted to share some helpful marketing tips that you can implement over your holiday break, in preparation for 2019. We’re a sucker for organisation, and you don’t have to spend copious amounts of time getting things in order for your brand. After all, it is Christmas, and you deserve to be spending some time away from the hustle and bustle of running your own biz. Here are a few small suggestions you can get sorted before the new year greets us.
Create an editorial calendar:
Every December, we plan out the dates in which we want to release a blog post for each month in the following year. As we release two blog posts per month, it can sometimes be hard to think of ideas on the spot, within that month. Often, we can take the easy route, and keep putting it off. Before we know, the date has come and gone, and the blog post hasn’t been drafted, let alone published.
Instead of placing so much pressure on yourself, you can think of ideas for blogs for 2019 from now. We use an editorial calendar within our workflow management program Asana to help us keep organized, but you can easily do so within a word document. If you prefer a much more traditional approach, you can’t go wrong with a good old fashioned diary.
Start by writing down all the months in the year from January 2019 to December 2019. Then, decide how many blog posts you would like to release per month. Say for example you have decided to post once a month, write down the dates in which you’d like your blogs to be released each month. Likewise, if you have decided to post twice a month, work out the two dates within each of the months in which you’d like your posts to be published. This gives you the crux of the framework of your editorial calendar. Make sure to also write down the due dates for these blogs, ensuring these dates are at least two weeks before your projected publish date.
You can then start to brainstorm ideas for blogs, and pop these ideas within the allocated dates of your choice.
There you have it – a complete editorial calendar and outlook for the following year! The great thing about this is that you will already know what dates your blogs will be going out, and you can correlate this with your social media posting (perfect for those who plan in advance), that way, you can promote the blogs on the same day that they are published.
PRO TIP: if you send out monthly EDM’s, add the dates for these to your editorial calendar, outlining the themes, tips and topics you’d like to cover.
Total time: 1 – 1.5 hours.
Create a digital vision board (or a traditional one, if you prefer):
We’re all about manifestation here at Content Savvy, and creating a vision board is a wonderful way to really picture where you would like your business to be by the end of 2019. If you don’t have the time or space for a traditional vision board, why not create a digital version?
We recently downloaded the Hay House Vision Board app and had some fun cultivating a beautiful board full of dreams, wishes and goals. Taking some time out to dedicate to a creative project such as this, not only gets those imaginative juices flowing, but it also helps you to manifest and visualise your life for the year to come.
Don’t be afraid of not achieving your goals and we really encourage you to aim high. The worst that can happen is that you don’t quite get there in 2019, so you roll that goal over to 2020. Put it out into the universe, and you will be rewarded when the time is right for you.
Total time: 1 hour
Start collecting content:
By this, we mean sourcing your ‘filler’ images to post alongside images of your products. Set up a Pinterest board that you can save inspo to. Create some folders on Insta so you can start saving content from like-minded accounts that you’d like to repost, and trawl stock photography sites such as Unsplash and Pexels and get downloading! Just remember to credit appropriately when you go to post them. You can also use this time to create any quote images you’d like to post throughout your feed by using programs such as Canva.
Total time: As long as you’d like!
We hope you find these tips useful as you head into the new year. This is our last blog post for 2018 so we would like to take the time to thank you for following our journey over the past year. Wishing you all a very merry Christmas, and a happy, prosperous 2019. We look forward to working with many of you next year!
X Cat and the CS Team.
Please note: We will be out of office from December 21st 2018 until January 14th January 2019.
Julia says
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I was going to do all these ideas! It’s great that you have them here all in a reference! Thankyou!