How to DIY Your Publicity Like a Pro
Author: Heather Stephens
Some days, we find that almost all our time goes to working for our clients and only a few minutes of the day are given to promoting our own company. We rush to grab that behind-the-scenes photo to post to Instagram and put the waiting blog post off for another day. As pros, you would think we would make this look easy. After all, this is what we do for others every day. But, in reality, finding the time to feed the social media machine, cultivate relationships with media and partnerships, and, especially, making videos, is hard to do for your own company, even for us.
There are a few ways that we’ve found to stay above the flood of work and still tend to our own publicity. My main word of advice is plan ahead and take advantage of any “slower” times when you can stockpile content. These tools will help you do just that.
Content Strategy
I start most of my major marketing projects with an audience persona session. This sales tool helps teams define who their audience is by asking specific questions about their current and potential customers. The questions are usually basic, but the conversations they spark can be very insightful. Paired with other data, information about your audience can help you understand what type of content they need and want, as well as when and how to present it.
I use the information we learn in these audience sessions and research to develop a content strategy. This includes main messaging, what types of content we need to create, when content needs to be delivered to the customer, and what channels we will use. This drives the rest of our efforts and it makes it easier when we start creating all of the content.
Editorial Calendar
This is one of my favorite tools as a content creator because it builds expectations. When working with a client, I like to spend a few hours each month, planning out what needs to be posted to social media, written as blogs, or promoted in other ways. Then, we know what photos, videos, blogs, and other things that we need to develop for that month (and ideally, for several months).
Editorial calendars can be maintained in a simple way with a spreadsheet that has a row for each day and tabs for future planning or it can be put into a project management tool. Choose a way that is quick and easy for you and keeps you on track.
While you can plan out a lot of your content in advance, don’t forget to keep an eye out for ongoing opportunities for photos, videos, retweets, posts, etc. An editorial calendar should not be your entire content plan, just a way to manage it.
Report Dashboards
You may wonder how a report dashboard saves time when it comes to creating content, but it does. The most important thing that a good dashboard can do is to identify what is working and what is not. It keeps you from wasting time on efforts that are not producing results and lets you pivot quicker to things that are working.
There are many tools you can use for reporting, but a couple of my go-to tools are Google Analytics and Google Data Studio. These are both free tools that have lower learning curves.
Need Help From the Pros
If you are struggling to keep up with your own publicity, there is a simple solution – hire a pro. While the tips above will certainly help many small businesses, sometimes it makes more sense to hire an agency to handle the work for you. If you are looking for help, consider us. We would love to put off another blog post for ourselves to create an effective content strategy for you.
Some days, we find that almost all our time goes to working for our clients and only a few minutes of the day are given to promoting our own company. We rush to grab that behind-the-scenes photo to post to Instagram and put the waiting blog post off for another day. As pros, you would think we would make this look easy. After all, this is what we do for others every day. But, in reality, finding the time to feed the social media machine, cultivate relationships with media and partnerships, and, especially, making videos, is hard to do for your own company, even for us.
There are a few ways that we’ve found to stay above the flood of work and still tend to our own publicity. My main word of advice is plan ahead and take advantage of any “slower” times when you can stockpile content. These tools will help you do just that.
Content Strategy
I start most of my major marketing projects with an audience persona session. This sales tool helps teams define who their audience is by asking specific questions about their current and potential customers. The questions are usually basic, but the conversations they spark can be very insightful. Paired with other data, information about your audience can help you understand what type of content they need and want, as well as when and how to present it.
I use the information we learn in these audience sessions and research to develop a content strategy. This includes main messaging, what types of content we need to create, when content needs to be delivered to the customer, and what channels we will use. This drives the rest of our efforts and it makes it easier when we start creating all of the content.
Editorial Calendar
This is one of my favorite tools as a content creator because it builds expectations. When working with a client, I like to spend a few hours each month, planning out what needs to be posted to social media, written as blogs, or promoted in other ways. Then, we know what photos, videos, blogs, and other things that we need to develop for that month (and ideally, for several months).
Editorial calendars can be maintained in a simple way with a spreadsheet that has a row for each day and tabs for future planning or it can be put into a project management tool. Choose a way that is quick and easy for you and keeps you on track.
While you can plan out a lot of your content in advance, don’t forget to keep an eye out for ongoing opportunities for photos, videos, retweets, posts, etc. An editorial calendar should not be your entire content plan, just a way to manage it.
Report Dashboards
You may wonder how a report dashboard saves time when it comes to creating content, but it does. The most important thing that a good dashboard can do is to identify what is working and what is not. It keeps you from wasting time on efforts that are not producing results and lets you pivot quicker to things that are working.
There are many tools you can use for reporting, but a couple of my go-to tools are Google Analytics and Google Data Studio. These are both free tools that have lower learning curves.
Need Help From the Pros
If you are struggling to keep up with your own publicity, there is a simple solution – hire a pro. While the tips above will certainly help many small businesses, sometimes it makes more sense to hire an agency to handle the work for you. If you are looking for help, consider us. We would love to put off another blog post for ourselves to create an effective content strategy for you.