To continue to grow your business, you know you need to reach out to prospects and connect with existing clients. Good communication needs to happen on a regular and frequent basis.
Many of your competitors have figured it out and are doing it well. In order to stay relevant, and top of mind with your prospects and clients, they need to be seeing or hearing from you on a very regular basis — both online and offline. The challenge is that most of us have more to do than time to do it all. So how do you manage your communications calendar effectively in a way that will generate business for you?
The simple answer is: 12 week it, theme it, and be done with it.
Let’s break this down so that it is so simple you can’t possibly find a reason to procrastinate or avoid doing it!
First: Identify the top twelve messages, conversations, or topics you find yourself continually talking about with your prospects and clients. If you have created a frequently asked question (FAQs) sheet on your website, you are well on your way. This is about getting your prospects familiar and comfortable with you as a likable authority. These will serve as your themes for the next twelve weeks.
Second: Script out what you typically convey during those twelve conversations in an easy-to-understand and sequenced fashion. If you have a relevant article that does the job, go with that. You don’t, necessarily, have to be the creator of the content. You can be the curator of it. It’s okay to borrow the brilliance of other trustworthy sources and associate yourself with their credibility. Be sure to give proper attribution.
You will want to consider short form and long form. For social media posts, you may want to synthesize and reduce the message to one or two sentences that can be incorporated into a graphic. Canva.com is my choice for creating post-worthy graphics. For a blog, you may wish to write out 500-750 words. (This article is 724 to give you an idea).
Third: Identify and select the various distribution channels to send or post your message. Here are the typical channels:
- Your current email list
- Texts
- Social media channels such as Linkedin, Facebook, and Instagram
- Blog and/or Vlog
- Podcast (your own)
- Guest of a podcast
- Webinar
- Networking events
- Journals, Newspapers, Newsletters (print media)
Fourth: Determine the correlation of which days you will send your weekly themed message for the week via which platforms. Monday could be your blog to your email list and a LinkedIn post that links back to it. Tuesday could be a graphic posted to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. There are services you can use to schedule posts on all of your various social media accounts. Wednesday, you may want to text your top clients and prospects. Thursday or Friday you may want to conduct a webinar or podcast. The strategy here is to broadcast your weekly themed message repetitiously across the various platforms your target audience frequents.
Fifth: Pick up the phone and check in on your prospects and clients. They will appreciate you thinking of them and connecting. Most likely, they will comment on something you have posted recently. In addition, explore what other information they would like to learn about and receive from you and build it into your queue. Inquire who they care about that may benefit from receiving your information and get a referral or two. Or three.
The bulk of the work is simply pulling together the content to push out on the different platforms. You most likely already have it in some form or another and it may just need to be updated or re-purposed. Once you have your content pulled together, determine the weekly order for sending out that week’s themed message. Figure out which day of the week will correspond to what distribution platform.
Twelve messages pushed out over five or six days on five or six platforms over twelve weeks makes for good communication. You will quickly be viewed as the authority and if you are likable, your pipeline will expand. Stay tuned on how to successfully convert those prospects to clients.
Make it up, make it fun, and get it done!