Digital Selling – The importance of a media plan

Dave Harries: How important Grant is planning in all of this content creation? You do talk about the importance of a media plan, so talk to me about that.

Grant Leboff: Essentially, what we’re saying is marketing teams and sales people, own media channels. Whether it’s a Facebook page, a LinkedIn page, a website, a blog, et cetera. Just doing it by happen chance, “Oh, we haven’t put anything for a couple of day.” This is not going to work at all. The idea is to plan everything out. I say to people, “have a year plan. Look at your year and say when are the school holidays, if that’s relevant? When are the big sporting events? When are the TV programs? When are the big political events? Could we put out relevant things at certain times for certain audiences? Are there times we want to go a bit lighter with our posting?”

Then have daily activities, weekly activities, monthly activities. You might say “we post twice a day to Twitter and Facebook. We publish something once a week on LinkedIn. We do one video a week. We put out a webinar a month.” It doesn’t matter what it is but by having that plan, you can be consistent with your content so the audience knows, “oh I know Friday is a webinar days.” Which means they start to get to know and they’ll come onto your website on the day you put that out, or whatever else. That’s good for consistency and it just makes the whole thing easier to manage.

Actually, you can plan a lot of this out. Even a daily newspaper when you look at it, how much of it’s a current story and how much is the star signs and the crosswords and the other things that they could’ve planned for, for a lot longer? You can’t create a whole newspaper in a few hours. Obviously there is very current things but there are other things that have been planned for. You have to have a plan. Especially when we’re talking in the concept of selling because sales people don’t have time to do all of this. They may have a blog once a week. It might be that they want to [create 00:01:55] a couple of things a week and they want to lean on the marketing department who are providing them with things a couple of times a month or whatever. As long as it’s planned for and everybody knows what they’re doing, it can work very, very well. You can’t run a media channel by chance. Nobody would try and do that. The more you can plan, the more you can prepare and the commission and work together, the easier it becomes.