Plan for Success - Managing Your Online Presence

We live in a digital age. People are constantly bombarded by ads, pictures, videos, emails and more all vying for their attention. When it comes to running your business, whether you’re a film company or not it can sometimes seem overwhelming trying to stay creative with your content while not letting the responsibility of posting wear you out. So today we are going to look at how you can be more time efficient and effective with your online marketing.

1) Think Ahead

The best thing you can do to not feel overwhelmed with your online marketing is to think ahead. Whether that be a week at a time, a month or quarter of the year. Thinking ahead allows you to pinpoint early on when you’re going to be running promotions, hosting events or making announcements so you can tailor your email campaigns or social media to have a bigger purpose than just randomly posting. It also allows you to create posts ahead of time instead trying to come up with something last minute that will be worthwhile to your audience.

2) Study Your Audience Insights

One of the great things about online marketing is that you are able to view the insights and analytics for your pages. This allows you to see what devices people are viewing your content from. What demographic is viewing it, where are they from and even what time of day they are viewing the content. But just having access to this information and looking it over won’t do you any good unless you act on it. Is there a certain time of day your followers are more active, then start planning to post during those times for maximum engagement. Is most of your audience on a certain platform? Maybe you should focus your efforts more on those platforms and not devote as much time to other ones. Even seeing what type of content your audience interacts with the most can be helpful. If you get the most traction from doing live videos then maybe you should start doing one weekly. If it’s pictures then maybe you want to release them more frequently. Theses are all things that knowing your analytics can help with.

3) Take Advantage of Scheduling

One of the best things about most of today’s online platforms and marketing tools is the ability to schedule posts. Whether its Facebook, YouTube or your email campaigns, scheduling things out can be a great advantage to you and your business. Many times I’ve sat down for the morning and scheduled out an entire quarter of Facebook post and YouTube videos. By taking the time upfront to do that I now have peace of mind knowing the content will go live when I want it to even if I’m busy on another project and forget about it. It’s also much easier to work for an hour or two in that frame of mind instead of having to jump into it for 5-10 minutes everyday or however often you post.

Along with scheduling out posts another helpful tip is to create a calendar that lists what’s being posted and when. This is a great way to help keep the overall big picture in mind while also having the ability to move around when you posts things and keep track of it all.

4) Use the Tools Available to You

When working on your online content take advantage of the tools available to you. For me I love using GoogleDrive. It allows me to access images or videos I want to post from any device regardless of where I am at the moment.

Another great tool is the copy and paste function. Many times I will use the same text for both my Facebook and Instagram posts and just swap out the pictures or video I’m posting with it. Copying and pasting is just another way to save a little time in the long run.

A third tool I’ve used quite often is the ability to have multiple editors on a Facebook page or managing one of my other channels. This allows me to share the content plan with them and assign certain posts for them to take care of. On a recent project I had one person who was in charge of posting pictures from the shoot and simply gave them the schedule of when to post stuff while I handled posting the videos. To do this we used the GoogleDrive calendar to be able to list when things needed to go live and allow everyone access to see it and modify it as needed. Along with GoogleDrive you can also use tools like Slack or Asana to help keep track of who is doing what and when is it due. Those platforms are also very helpful with communicating with the other people on your team.

So there you are, just a few ways that you can plan for success when it comes to your online presence. All of these are tricks and tools I’ve been using for some time and they have definitely helped me in growing my online presence and be more consistent while doing it.