A steady flow of communication is vital to keep your audience engaged, it’s also a proven way to capture and keep an audience on social media, as is ensuring you always have fresh content.

Sitting back and planning allows you to brainstorm a lot of ideas and add new ones for review as they come to mind. It also allows these you to take ad-hoc ideas and align them all so they form a consistent marketing message. If you add these ideas to a ‘bucket’ you will always have some content ready to go so that when you run dry you can keep that consistent fresh engaging content coming to your audience.

Ensure that you have content relevant to important dates ready to go and release at an optimum time for that important date. This eliminates rushing at the last minute to get content out.

Once you have an outline of what you want to post and when, you can at the minimum, delegate your own time effectively to complete the tasks. If you are lucky to have extra resources in the form of staff or funds to engage professionals, you can decide what tasks will be best completed by whom and be able to give them a clear deadline.

Planning in advance allows you to plan for specific goals you wish to achieve, and that your communications align with these goals and the correct stage of your funnel. It also prevents cross-platform errors and duplication. Having a clear layout of what was and will be executed when also allows for accurate measurement of results, so you can see what works and what didn’t more clearly. Use advanced tools to plan what best times to release your content. You may have a great idea for a post on Monday morning, but will it get better exposure on Thursday night? Finally, it lets you strategically target content to suited demographics and platforms, and to people in various stages of the product purchase lifecycle.

The first step to organising your content is to create a place to store your ideas and concepts, a content repository.

There are many ways you could store the content in a repository, Ideal tough you want to be able to access it fast, from anywhere, and if working in a team share it easily.

Now the important part, you’ll need a tool to help plan and schedule your posts, this is the Content Calendar

From something as simple as a shared Google Drive and shared Google docs and Sheets, to a software solution such as Monday, Click Up or Planoly.