Are you planning your marketing content for 2025? This approach may help. And It should only take you 30 mins, and a piece of paper. 📅 52 weeks in a year. 🃏 52 cards in a deck. Can you break down what you do into 4 areas? The 4 problems your clients have? ♣️♠️♥️♦️ 4 suits... Within those 4 (or so) areas can you break them down into 13 specific ideas you can elaborate on. What are 13 things your ideal clients ask you in each of those areas? If you stick to this, you'll have 1 new thing each week to post that is perfectly aligned to your business. And you'll continually have ideas to refer back to. I like to visualise this on a mindmap, or you can just draw it out on a piece of paper. If you're really organised get it straight into Trello and start planning which piece comes first. NOTE: Actually, this year I'm suggesting businesses focus on only 2 content pillars (rather than 4). Why? AI summaries in Google search results and the rise of Chat GPT/LLMs means that the old top of funnel content is never going to perform so well. So you need a depth of content and a real FOCUS on building content that is truly valueable to our audiences (although hopefully you were already doing that). So instead of 4 suits of cards - just play with the 🔴 and ⚫ colours from the deck of cards. And think of the different angles you can play with under your 2 main topics. The rest still stands. Focus on your high value pieces of content (that may or may not be gated). Think about those webinars, eBooks, templates, guides, podcasts that truly add value (and can be easily repurposed and remixed later. And leads will start coming in, the more you talk about the challenges that your clients face, and the solutions you can help them with. p.s. The attached image is just a silly example about coffee. It doesn't include 13 items for each - but if your business was coffee, you'd easily flesh that out quicker than I did. ;)
This is grand! I'm not a coffee drinker - but there's nothing silly about this. I'm sure if you send this to Geoff Starbucks or Natalie Costa that they'd rip your arm off for this!
Will try this out, Charlie! Thank you for that!
You just created a domain model in the form of a mind map. Yay!
Thanks Charlie Southwell. Really helpful, as ever 🙏
Simplifying content planning to just two pillars is spot on. Focus and depth will definitely make a bigger impact than spreading yourself thin. Nice tip on repurposing too!
Mmmm. Coffee.
Love this Charlie, thank you!
You got me just at the right time Charlie! 😁
B2B Marketing Consultant & Fractional CMO | FCIM DipM Chartered Marketer | Ceramicist
1wNice. What tool did you use to create the mind map?