HOW TO CREATE AN EFFECTIVE BUSINESS PLAN FOR THE YEAR 2020: A 5 STEP GUIDE
Are you still basking in the euphoria of a new year?
That period where we engage in making plans (wishes?) we have no real or actionable plan of achieving.
This year we want to help you make things different. (At least for your digital content)
This article is designed to guide you in 5 steps on how to plan your digital content for your business in the year 2020.
The goal is to plan your online business calendar—including
content creation, sharing, promotions, campaigns in a way that helps you streamline and put to use the information you have so you can get feasible results without having to spend the whole year on brainstorming
Fortunately, you can do this even if your business plans for the year have not yet been fully developed. Ready? Let’s go for it.
Step 1: Complete a SWOT Analysis
It is essential to complete a SWOT analysis, which looks at your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. In a business context, this gives room for uncovering opportunities you can exploit and weaknesses you can prevent against.
Some questions you may need to ask are:
Strengths
- What are you good at?
- What are your unique skills?
- What experience do you have?
- Weaknesses
- Where do you need to improve?
- What resources do you lack?
- What costs you time and/or money?
- Opportunities
- How can you do more for your existing customers?
- How can you use technology to enhance your business?
- Are there new target market to reach?
- Threats
- What challenges do you face?
- What’s the trend like in your industry?
- What are your competitors doing that you aren’t?
Step 2: Create Your Goals for the Year
Do you have a plan for your business in 2020?
If you don’t, its not too late to get down to it because a business without a plan is a business set to fall. Benjamin Franklin said it best: “Failing to plan is planning to fail.”
From the feedback derived from the SWOT analysis, map out a goal for your business.
Don’t set your business up to fail in the New Year. Instead, take time out to write out an annual plan that will help your business prepare for a successful 2020. It does not have to be an elaborate plan. If you are a small business owner, your deepest desires for your business are good enough with actionable steps to achieve it. A medium or large scale company can have it done in few steps when its members work on it together.
Step 3: Content Creation Planning
The next step is to decide on the types of content you will be creating.
If you do not have a blog or a business website yet, this may be the right time to get on board and expand your reach.
Do you want to keep up with just social media post, or create blog articles, or create videos, infographics, or more?
Now based on your growth goals, think about the types of content you might want to create to achieve each goal:
- Sales (increase revenue)
- product creation
- list building (new subscribers)
- promotions (more engagements)
- Infographics
At this point, you would only need to brainstorm ideas for each. Under list building, for instance, you might say you want a download for every post—or maybe you’ve been thinking about creating a 7-day email course.
Step 4: Setting Your Frequency
Earlier on, it was believed by online marketers that you had to have a specific time and format for posting your content online to have more engagement, but it turns out that it is not totally true.
Creating contents should be done on your own schedule and it is better if it comes natural to you. You may decide to write a blog article or it might be an audio podcast that you feel would help you achieve your goal for a period.
Don’t fall into the trap of setting an unrealistic schedule, forcing you or your team to create content for content’s sake. Choose a schedule that works for you, giving you time to create higher quality, more meaningful content.
The goal is not to overwhelm your audience with contents that do not resonate with them but to connect and engage them thereby creating contents that satisfies and add values to them
Remember. The goals are traffic, engagement, and sales.
Step 5: Creating Your Content
You can create content days or months before your scheduled dates or wait until the date is near before you churn out articles and video scripts at once. How you do it is totally up to you.
Here are some tips to keep you on track.
- Never underestimate the time it can require to create quality content. Give yourself more time than you think you’ll need.
- Never give into postponing your deadlines. It could be tempting to shift the publishing dates forward when it seems that you are behind schedules. To meet your goals, you’ve got to meet your deadlines.
- If you want to meet your goals, the calendar is the boss. Discipline yourself and you will see your business grow
- Having drawn a plan for your content marketing calendar, follow the plan! Watch your due dates and put in the work.