Today I share 3 simple things you can implement right now that will help you have an impact with your comms and save you time whilst hitting your personal or business goals.
We have to adapt to the mood right now amidst a global pandemic, but we can still continue and create value with our business communication.
These 3 tools and approaches can be used together or individually and will help you have a short term plan or approach to communicating in this time of continuing change or flux for everyone, and will set you up for when things improve too.
Today you will learn;
- How to repurpose your content to create value and impact right now
- How and why you should be nurturing people who already love your business
- How scheduling can save you time on your social media planning
Social media scheduling tools I mentioned in this episode:
SEMrush is an all-in-one digital marketing platform. It’s best known for its SEO and PPC toolkits, but it also has a Social Media toolkit, which includes the Social Media Poster tool.
SocialBee is a powerful social media scheduling platform that goes beyond scheduling and includes features like competitor research.
Sendible is an all-in-one social media management tool designed to help solopreneurs and agencies manage and amplify their brands.
MeetEdgar is a purpose-built social media scheduling and automation tool that makes it easy to publish your content on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Buffer is a software application for web and mobile that lets you schedule content to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Linkedin from one dashboard.
Other links I mentioned: Weetabix twitter: https://twitter.com/weetabix
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Full Transcription
Hello, and welcome to this episode of Communication Strategy That Works with me, Emma Drake. Hi everyone. How are we all doing today?
Well, we’re still in the middle of a global pandemic when I’m recording this, but hopefully, things are starting to improve and things are easing for you wherever you are this week, fingers crossed. I wanted to help you today, make your life a bit easier, but also help you reach your goals with your communication activity at the same time. Today’s all about three simple things you can implement right now that will help you impact your communications, even if you’re time-poor and have no budget.
Whilst we can’t carry on as normal with our communication at the moment and it’s tricky, isn’t it? Because, everyone’s in a slightly different mood, the tone is different, and we do need to be mindful of that. The business carries on, but we can still create value with our business communication. So these three tools and approaches could be used together, but also individually, but hopefully, they will actually help you do some planning and help you with your short term plan right now.
The first one is, re-purposing is your best friend right now.
So what is repurposing? Repurposing is when you take something you’ve already written or a talk you’ve already delivered or created, and you chop it up, and you reshape it to reuse it for another or multiple uses. So how much are you really making of what you’ve already got on your files or on your desk right now?
For example, each of my podcast episodes is about a thousand words, the shorter one’s are about a thousand words, and they provide me per episode with four articles or blog posts and five to six social media posts, plus some themes to explore as prompts for questions, for example, for emails or for social media as well.
I produce weekly so that’s a lot of content I could potentially use and a lot of content I could be putting into my planner, but where to start? Well, start with focusing your time on what you know already works well. This is my big tip. Maybe you launched a report a few years back. So can you chop it up?
Can you use part of it for an email to your customers? Maybe take the infographics from it and create a mini update for social media. Can you take the headings and create a series of blog posts or emails reminding people of the report and its benefits, but maybe updating it a little if something has changed just to make it relevant to now?
Maybe you’ve run an event a few years ago or talked at an event? So go back to that talk and take a look at the speaking points you noted down or the questions you were asked. Can you make each one a blog post or a LinkedIn article for a mini-series, maybe with a little bit of tweaking? Or the headings could be, or the you were asked, could be a series of prompts for social media posts? Maybe reflecting on, you know, this time last year we were talking about X, Y, Z, but actually now, these are the most important things.
So it allows you to talk about something current, but actually starting somewhere where you know works and where you’ve already ‘done the thinking’ basically. This could also make an email to your customers with an update and a reason to get in touch or a call to action. So starting at a place where most of the work is already done and building from there can create some killer content that hits the mark, and Hey, guess what? It already has a strategic goal and is largely approved copy because you already did the thinking and the planning for it previously, so you should get a headstart on that. So repurposing your content, that’s my first tip.
My second tip is nurturing relationships that are already strong.
Public relations, and you would have heard me talk about this in other podcasts if you’ve been listening to my podcasts, that public relations is a great tool, but often underused as a strategic tool, because it’s often only really seen as something you do if you have something to launch or some good news to talk about. Well, spoiler alert, PR is not all about the media, but it’s so much more than that.
So this particular tip is about reaching out to people who already work with and who know your business and nurturing these relationships, connecting with people you know in your business and showing some personality and providing great customer service all aid public opinion and help build trust in your products and services. And using public relations in this way is generally a no-cost or at very least a low cost way of doing this.
Don’t be afraid to show emotion and personality right now. I hear a lot about authenticity, it’s one of our buzzwords in communications and public relations and marketing, but we’re not talking about laying it out bare for everyone to see on social media when you have a bad day. You know, some people want to do that and that’s fine, you can do that. Hey, no judging here, but I’m talking about just showing a human side of you and your business, and just showing some empathy. You know, we love to engage with approachable brands, right? I know I do, and there’ve been some really clever brands finding lots of great ways to engage with existing audiences on social media right now.
There was a particular one I really liked and actually, you must’ve seen it, Weetabix is a UK based cereal brand and they recently came up with lots of clever ways to help people remember their brand by inviting people to interact with their cereal in completely different ways to how they usually would. So have your favourite Weetabix cereal, but lots of different ways. They have it with beans, they had it with Marmite, they had it with [inaudible 00:05:52] but it sparked a lot of interests, but a lot of interest in other brands as well. You should go and check them out on Twitter and you’ll see what I mean.
Now, these guys will have resources and ideas, they’re bigger brands. Some of you listening may already be bigger brands, but you can apply some of these principles to what you’re doing. One way you could do this is create some emails to talk to your customers and ask them questions. Ask them how they’re doing, ask them if there’s any way you could improve your service, ask them if they know about all your services that you’ve still got going on at the moment.
I mean, lots of companies have to reduce their services, but actually, if you’re still doing everything, or maybe doing some of them and not all, tell people. Tell people, but also ask them for feedback. Say, “What would you like help with? How have your needs changed?” Nurture and serve them well in this time, and they will remember you.
So you want to avoid a communication vacuum in this time, and you don’t want to have appeared not to notice that anything’s different. So this is just about showing some empathy and recognising with people that already know you, that they might have different struggles and might need different support from you.
So my third tip is about scheduling your social media.
There are some great tools for scheduling and generally making your life easier, making my life a hell of a lot easier, let me tell you. I use Buffer. I’ve used others. I’m actually thinking of changing from Buffer, but there are lots of other tools such as Sendible, Meet Edgar, SocialBee, SmartQ, Semrush. They’re all good ones with excellent scheduling features and have lots more functionality than some of the others. Some of those I’ve mentioned offer free plans, some don’t. But let’s be honest, for a few hundred dollars or pounds a year, they are going to save you literally hours of your life, which you could be spending doing other things you should be doing, rather than spending all your time on your social media channels.
(See links to mentioned platforms in show notes)
It also means you can create a plan offline and then schedule it all in, so you don’t have to work for a couple of weeks thinking about social media, you’ve got your posts running and you just need to keep on top of who’s engaging with your content and also obviously engaging with other people’s content too. I can then plan and post and then tweak for each of my social media channels, I can upload images before choosing a date and time for it to be released.
Some of the tools mentioned allow you also to curate other content and schedule in different ways. So it’s worth having a little look at ones that would suit you and suit your business. I also use Canva, love Canva, and scheduled direct from there as well as I’m a prime member. But again, you know, you’re talking a few dollars a month really, for a whole lot more of your life to be easy.
Social media also has a short shelf life, so using the first point about re-purposing content, please go back and reuse some of those posts that performed well. So rather than creating more posts, go back two or three months and look at what performed well, look at what I would call your evergreen content, so things that you want to be talking about all the time, and you can reschedule them.
Maybe update them with a new image and make them current, but sometimes you can just reschedule them. So some of the tools I mentioned previously do allow you to do this automatically. And some, like Buffer, you have to go back and do a bit more work and rebuffer them as they call it. So have a look at that as well, have a little play around with it.
I often go back a few months and reschedule social media. That’s my kind of what I would call bread and butter of what I do, so my evergreen posts. And it does save me a ton of time. There are loads of people that won’t have seen it the first time, so you know, and even if they did, Hey, it’s a great reminder for them for a second time. So today, you’ve learned three ways to save you time and money in the long run with your communication planning right now, how to repurpose your content to get maximum value from it, how and why you should be nurturing people who already love your business and how to schedule your social media.
So finally, thank you for listening to this episode of Communication Strategy That Works. Don’t forget to check my show notes for those links that I mentioned, and I’d really love it if you would subscribe to my podcast and leave me a review. And also, if you think there’s someone that could benefit from listening to this podcast, please share this within your networks. So I’ll just say bye for now and see you next time.