How Content Planning Saves You Time
Writing a book is only half the battle for authors. Marketing it effectively is the other crucial half. With the ever-expanding array of promotional channels available today, managing your book marketing efforts can become overwhelming and time-consuming. That's where content planning steps in as your trusty organizational and time-saving companion.
In this blog post, we'll delve into essential techniques and resources that authors can use to streamline their promotional efforts and make the most of their valuable time.
Implement a Content Calendar
A content calendar is an invaluable tool that provides a visual representation of your content plan, organizes your marketing efforts, and ensures a consistent online presence. This will typically include publication dates, content topics, keywords or hashtags, and any other relevant details.
Whether you prefer digital tools or old-fashioned planners, a content calendar helps you plan, schedule, and track your promotional activities:
Editorial Planning: plot out your content strategy for the month or quarter. Include blog post topics, social media themes, and email marketing campaigns. Having a visual overview of your content strategy keeps you on track.
Scheduling: allocate specific publication dates and times for your content. Consistency is key in building and maintaining an author brand.
Promotions and Events: mark important dates, such as your book launch, book signings, and speaking engagements on your content calendar. Also include any relevant awareness days/weeks/months and the hashtags that will be used to tie in with your platform. This ensures you're prepared and can promote these events effectively.
When filling out a content calendar, it’s important to understand your brand. What do you want to be known as and known for? It can help to write a brief character sketch for yourself with a single succinct sentence that describes the tone, aesthetic, and themes associated with your brand. A well-defined identity will allow you to more easily and consistently apply a standard to your posts that you can expect a target audience to engage with.
When you sell yourself as an author as much as your book(s), you widen the possibilities for content (not just directly promoting the book in a sales-y way) and build a relationship with readers to draw them into your bibliography as opposed to convincing them of each book.
Batch Your Content
When you're juggling multiple tasks – like writing and marketing your books on top of your life’s other responsibilities – it's easy to feel overwhelmed and scattered.
One possible solution is setting aside dedicated blocks of time for each activity when possible. In the context of content creation for marketers, this process is called ‘batching’ – and it’s a content creator’s best friend.
Instead of stopping your day to create a single book-focused post for that day, create a high volume of marketing content over the course of a few hours (in ‘batches’) once per week. With a more streamlined workflow, you can bring order to what can otherwise be a chaotic process and transform your productivity. By structuring your activity this way, you can enhance efficiency, maintain consistency, and even improve the quality of your content by being more fully immersed in a single type of work.
When you begin batching content, it helps to first establish a realistic amount of time you can devote per week to this with the other tasks and things in your life to balance. Once you know concretely what time you have available, you can start making a plan.
Here's how you can apply batching to your marketing strategy:
Social Media: spend a day or two crafting social media updates, graphics, and captions for the entire month. Tools like Buffer and Hootsuite allow you to schedule posts in advance, saving you time on daily posting.
Content Types: decide on a handful of different types of posts to create more variety and engagement. Brainstorm a bunch of ideas for each post to share over the next month.
Blog Posts: set aside a few days each month to write and schedule your blog posts for the upcoming weeks. This way, you ensure a consistent flow of fresh content without the stress of writing on a deadline.
Use a Content Aggregator
If you’re promoting your book across multiple social media accounts, it can become time-consuming and inefficient to continually create the same or similar posts for several different platforms, then directly publish them the very moment you want them live.
Thankfully, social media aggregators exist to provide solutions to these promotional problems (and more!). In one centralized application, aggregators streamline the social media posting process to easily fill up your content calendar with weeks (or months) of scheduled content. They even allow you to track audience behaviour with analytics tools.
While Hootsuite is the most well-known name among aggregators with all the bells and whistles at your disposal, it’s generally more than necessary and expensive for most authors. We instead recommend Buffer — a simpler, less expensive, and more accessible option that offers most (if not all) of what you need as an author in just the free plan. And to get those analytics, engagement tools, and unlimited scheduled posts, Buffer paid plans are the lowest cost among their competitors.
Repurpose Content
You don't have to reinvent the wheel with every new piece of content you create. Instead, maximize the value of your existing work by repurposing it into different formats. Here's how you can save time while extending your content's reach:
Blog to Social Media: extract key points or quotes from your blog posts and repurpose them as social media updates. This allows you to share your expertise and drive traffic to your website with minimal effort.
Book Excerpts: turn chapters or excerpts from your book into blog posts, infographics, or podcast episodes. This not only saves time but also provides varied content for different audiences.
Video and Audio Content: record video or audio versions of your blog posts, or create videos discussing key book concepts. These can be shared on YouTube, podcasts, or social media.
Not only should you consider repurposing your content, but even reposting in certain circumstances. In the case of Instagram, you wouldn’t want multiple instances of the same post on your grid in a short period of time. Although, when it comes to a faster moving platform like X (formerly known as Twitter) where the average life of a post is 18 minutes, you might repost throughout the week or even the same day.
Time is a valuable resource and content planning is the compass that helps you efficiently navigate your book promotions timeline. By combining techniques like batching content creation, using content aggregators, maintaining a content calendar, and repurposing content you can save precious time while building a strong online presence and connecting with your audience.
The goal isn't just to market your book – it's to engage and build lasting relationships with your readers. So, start planning your content today, and watch your author marketing efforts flourish while you enjoy more time to do what you love most.