Simple Content Marketing

I started writing my daily post Friday morning. The coffee had only been dripping for a few minutes when I tapped out six words, unsure yet if I’d keep them or start a new idea.

Then came one small calamity after another. A planned out quiet moment to reflect turned into the beginning of a chaotic weekend lasting until Monday evening.

With each passing day, I wish for more simplicity, more space in my day for when events are taken out of my control.

What does this have anything to do with content writing or marketing?

Well, my friend, keeping things simple is a great lesson for marketing professionals.

Rarely does anything go as planned. Your colleagues might not submit their work on time, making yours late. A national tragedy may happen, making your messaging sound insensitive if you don’t address it as an organization. Perhaps none of your work is instantly approved, and there are unplanned rewrites in your near future. Thus, we need to befriend simplicity.

Here are some lifestyle simplicity habits that I, for one, plan on implementing in my work:

1. Declutter your social media platforms. Focus on the one or two that really carry your business.
2. Set a goal. Work only toward that goal.
3. Block out some space in your day to catch up on the unplanned activities.
4. Learn from past work. What content does your audience gravitate toward? How long does it really take you to create social media posts, blogs, etc.?
5. Do more of what works, and don’t overthink it. You don’t need to go all fancy until you have the time to do so. Done is better than perfect, and doing the things you know saves you time and mental capacity.
6. Prep. Work ahead in your marketing, and I mean really ahead, like 2-3 months minimum. I’m learning (too slowly) that things can go awry fast and you’ll want plenty of time to recreate or replace anything that did, in fact, go south.
7. Create easy, evergreen messages, promotions, and posts to share on the fly in case you find yourself looking at an empty calendar.
8. Speaking of easy, have a brand tool kit with all your logos, a slew of stock images that relate to your brand, fonts and colors ready to be fit together in any way at a moments notice. Use them to build fast posts.
9. Use tools like Canva or Adobe Spark, Hootsuite or Buffer, to quickly create and share on the go.
10. Be satisfied with your pace. If you’re reading this, you are likely one person trying to do all the fun things to promote your brand (or your client’s or your employer’s). You can only get so much done in a day, so focus on the most impactful pieces and fill in some easy but valuable content along the way.