Effective ways to plan your content: The different tools available

How effective is your social media content? Does it often get left on the back burner, due to "more important jobs" taking front and centre? Here are some tips and tools to help effectively plan your content to help make the most of your social media presence and put less strain on you.

Planning your content is not only an effective business approach but also an essential marketing strategy. So, ensuring you plan your content will help give you a more effective approach. Pre-planning your content also gives you the time to ensure what you are posting will help connect with your clients and prospective clients, you can use a number of different tools to look into your insights and plan around your most active follower times and activity. With how quick technology is evolving, and how businesses can use it, planning ahead can help you optimise your content to give you the best interaction and reach. All different content, blogging, social media, etc., need a successful social media strategy. This requires regular publishing and engaging with followers to see positive results.

You need to ensure you are present on social media and interact with clients, prospective clients and other businesses. There are a number of different apps and tools available to help you make the most of your content and online presence, from social media content schedulers to different CRM software. Each helps to optimise your content in the best way for you, your customers and your business. There will always be so many different options available, so finding one that works for you shouldn’t be too difficult. There are many that are user friendly that can provide you with all the information you need to help create and plan effective content. Effective content planning offers you the opportunity to engage with and sell to prospects as well as recurring customers/clients.

Syncing calendars

A great place to start would be syncing your email to your calendar so any appointments and deadlines can be seen by all the team, without all the back and forth. If connected through Calendar apps, Sales automation tools, Customer relationship management software, Email providers the calendar markers can also be visible on your phone, if needed.

You can use your regular calendar to help you create your social media content calendar, especially if you are on a tight budget or have no idea where to start. Calendars help you get, and hopefully stay, organised. Creating a social media calendar helps your marketers, or yourself, plan out posts for entire weeks or months in advance. This is more effective because it frees up working hours to strategize for the future, and if and when needed, to quickly create any posts about breaking news in your industry, instead of panicking about what needs to be posted for the day and when.

Using a calendar also helps you plan for each social network, to customise posts instead of spamming all platforms with the same message. You can use a flowing theme but each social media platform may focus on different groups of your target audience. You should take the time to craft custom messages for each network, and doing this in advance will save time throughout the week and ensure you're being thoughtful and intentional when you do post.

Social media content calendars

Following on from syncing your calendars, there are plenty of different options available for social media content calendars specifically for planning your content. Content calendars have particular prompts to help build a strong, organised and optimised social media publishing schedule. Some of the key prompts include:

• Content types (Blog post, social media post [Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.])

• Post title - To help give a little insight into what the content is about, this also helps you keep track of the topics you have already created content for.

• Link for the content - Once live, copy the link to the post. This gives your team ease of access and a direct route.

• Snippet for copy - To give further insight into the information on the post.

• Image link - Images help attract more attention to your posts, providing a link gives you more insight into your post.

• Publish date - This helps to track how often you are posting and when the post went live.

Scheduling tools

To help you stay organised, and bulk create and prepare posts, a scheduling tool will be your best friend. There are so many different scheduling tools out there on the market now, knowing which one to use can become a little overwhelming for some people, and that is okay! The way we use technology is constantly changing, so it isn’t surprising, and more people are overwhelmed than you may think. Using the scheduling tools come hand in hand with using your content calendar, you plan and prep on your calendar, and then write up and schedule using the scheduling tool, be sure to look into your social media insights to know what time is the best time to on each channel.

One of the more accessible, and FREE, tools available is: Business suite. It lets you manage all of your connected accounts across Facebook and Instagram in one place. It offers a variety of tools that makes it easier to manage your business presence for free. Business Suite can help you reach more people and stay up-to-date, while you manage your business presence in one place.

Another free scheduling tool is Buffer. Buffer is a software application, designed to manage your social media accounts, by providing the means for a user to schedule posts to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Instagram Stories, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. On their paid service you can also have tools that analyse your results and engage with your community.

CRM Software

Customer relationship management software is a tool that helps businesses organize and manage their customer relationships on a centralized and easy-to-use platform (CRM). A CRM helps you to record and analyse all clientele and customer interaction.

You can use systems that look at all your marketing tools and structures, sales databases, customer service experiences, and operations tools. This makes it easy to optimize and completely personalise your campaigns and processes with data from your CRM, which leads to more powerful and impactful work from your team.

These are just some examples of tools you could use in your business; to help improve customer service, drive sales, and increase revenue overall by tracking leads and showing all customer activity in one place, businesses have clear insight into where they stand with each customer in the buying process and where they can improve in the future. This creates an easier job for yourself but also a much better experience for your customers.