DIGITAL CONTENT PLANNING

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 COLLABORATIVE CONTENT PLANNING TEMPLATE AND SYSTEM

If you listened to our collaborative tools podcast episode, you would have heard us talk about Ciaran's post-it note planner.
We promised to share this with you all and thought that as well as the free download, we would give you some notes on the
system and how it works.

It's a 'planning from scratch' system that's great for getting the ideas from the whole team down and to start the process of
building out and organising your content plans before you go into production. It's a process Ciaran developed over a number
of years working with lots of big brands and has been used to teach whole teams just starting out with their content
marketing plans how to effectively brainstorm and organise their content calendars and campaigns.

You could actually use it for any collaborative process. We've seen it used successfully with multiple teams including
creatives from marketing brand and design. It is one of those processes that continue to surprise positively the more you
apply it to different teams and situations. It was never intended to work as a system for very large groups of people to
collaboratively plan, but we have seen it work with groups of up to 20 people if they are all focussed and aligned to what
you are trying to achieve.

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 GETTING STARTED
There are a few stages to get this process working really well which this article will outline for you. So lets get started.

Download the Planning sheet template and print it out on A3 paper. You will need as many sheets as you have months you
want to plan for - plus a couple of extra's in case things take off. In practice, we have found that planning for 2-3 months in
detail plus maybe a rough outline of 4-6 months works quite well.

Appoint a facilitator to coordinate the session. The facilitator's job is to run the process and make sure everything good and
bad gets captured. The facilitator will need to source the following items...

- Post-it notes that fit on the grid planner template ( see download) A few different colours can be beneficial.
- Multiple A3 Copies of the planning template
- Lots bold markers for writing on the post-its

Additional but optional items.

-Multi coloured pipe cleaners

- Multi-coloured felt tip pens
- An outrageously silly hat ( more on this later as it is not for every organisation )
- Food- a brain work out like this needs energy.
- Plenty of liquid. Water is ideal, but tea and coffee have their place in most meetings.

We find a lot of people like to fiddle and create while thinking hard and these can aid the creative process. Adding in felt tip
pens and pipe cleaners can really bring an energy to proceedings. Just be sure to encourage participants to play with and
make use of these creative play items at the start of the session. These extra items help to liven up the session and make it
more exciting and fun. They also clearly define this as not your average team meeting. Also be sure to gather the items back
in at the end of the session and keep them in a box for future meetings.

Using your planning sheets, in the left-hand columns write the days of the week if you are planning daily. ( there are seven
rows for this purpose!) Next, for each month fill out the days of that month in pencil into each cell, so you effectively get a
calendar month for every month you are planning. You can just start the process on each sheet and get your team to take a
sheet each and fill it out in next to no time. (or get it done in advance - it's up to you, but we often do this as part of the
getting started, warm up routine for the session.)

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 EXPLAIN THE PROCESS
Get the team together around a large table. ( the more space, the better) Have lots of post-it note packs available along with
some nice bold marker pens for writing on the post-it notes.
Explain this is a collaborative planning process and that any idea for this session is a good one. The teams objective is to
generate ideas. Explain that any or all of the content may or may not get used, but that this will be refined at a later stage.
Your aim is in this session is just to have fun and generate ideas.
Explain that you are going to focus the group on some fundamental questions and work through each month one by
one. You want ideas and lots of them. Every suggestion anyone has needs to be written on a post-it note and submitted to
the facilitator. More often than not people will voice an idea, to begin with. Your answer as facilitator should be - great -
capture that - write it down. ( if they don't have a post it note pad at this point, throw one in their direction)
As ideas get submitted by you, you can read them out, or ask questions to clarify what is meant. If the group is larger than 4-
5 people, it's helpful to have someone to scribe notes onto the post-its to capture these additional answers as they come in,
but as much as you can when people shout out ideas, you want to encourage them to fill out a post-it with their idea. They
will eventually get the idea. For those who scribble away multiple notes- encourage them to verbally share the idea before
submitting the post-it to the planning pool on and around the sheets. This helps to ensure the group mind is aware of all
that is being contributed and can often help to spark other angles and ideas.
Start your session by going over your key business objectives for the year and any for specific months. This is important to
recap on. It sets the context of all this creativity against the core target you are trying to achieve and helps to align the
outcomes to this. Everyone should be aware of these strategic business objectives but if not this session is an excellent way
for them to get up to speed. It always worth checking for clarification on these objectives before the session. You'd be
amazed that what you think is the goal can very often have shifted slightly, and you don't want to spend valuable creative
time discussing what your goals are.
It is also worth giving a little context to each month from a customer perspective. Particullary for B2C organisations, each
month will typically have outside key dates and events that will effect what your customers and potential customers are up
to and thinking about. Big public holidays, national events, big audience TV programmes, School holidays, Hot cold or wet
weather, Festivals, significant sporting events, planned strikes... There is always a brief overview narrative that can help the
group focus on the month or months you are planning. This recap and summary is particulalry relevant if you are planning
out activity many months from the point you are currently at as they help your team to get into the mental zone of that
month.
Next, brainstorm the major events you know are happening in your organisation each month. Focus on a month at a time
and invite people to volunteer these. It helps if you use a separate boldly colour of post-it note exclusively for these as they
are the cornerstones of your activity What do you know is going to happen that month? Any product launches? Events?
Mailings? Pr? Promotions? New stores? New website functionality or domains? Major deadlines? Milestones?

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 EMAIL MARKETING

Next focus on any regular emails mailings that you have happening each week?

Great - write an email post-it note and position it into the grid- even if you don't know what the
content will be. If you do know - great - write it down on the post-it. Do the same for blogs, videos,
podcasts, webinars.

Again different colours can help here but keep the colours consistent.

Map it all out. It can help to ensure you have to hand the content plans for the same months the
previous year to help establish what you did then and remind people of what has been tried and
perhaps what already worked well.

The aim is not to merely copy that content but to come up with new angles and new ideas to move
things forward for this new month

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 WHAT THE CUSTOMER IS THINKING

Next Brainstorm What is your customer thinking / doing in each month?

If you want to help get people started a quick run through your social media posts for that month the
year before in advance of the session can be useful. If you want to go one step further, take a look at
some of your competitor's social media feeds for that month. You can share this overview with the
team. It doesn't have to be much. Just a few bullet points to get everyone into the zone of your
customers for that month/season.

Brainstorm it as a team. Anyone with an idea can grab a pack of post-it notes and write their idea
down. They don't have to get verbal airplay to get an idea on the board, but they should hand any
ideas they create to the facilitator so they can be read out as they came in and slapped on the month
grid.

The facilitator can decide to try to walk in their shoes. Imagine its December? What is on their minds,
what will they be doing. Mark each idea down on a separate post-it note. Place these on the monthly
planning sheet -or just above it if they fit (we are going to use these in a minute).

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 AGREE KEY THEMES

Can you agree on any key themes for each month? Are there any common threads you can see? Write
these down on post-it notes and place at the top of the sheet in the themes box.

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 MAP OUT ALL YOUR IDEAS

This is the fun stage.... You get to map out your content ideas. At this stage, everyone is somewhat in
the zone. We can all see what themes we have, we can see business priorities, and we can begin to
come up with content and campaign ideas that might work. Work through week by week and invite
ideas for content. Any empty place holders for email, podcast, webinar blog post, etc.? nows the time
to come up with ideas. At this stage, you may well discover there are several ideas for one slot. That's
not a problem with this planning system. Get them all written down and simply stack them one on top
of the other on the place holder if this happens.

We usually find that an hour to 90 minutes is an adequate block of time for such a session, so when
you feel the energy begining to flag, as it will at some stage, its time to wrap up the meeting and
thank everyone for their contributions. Explain that what has been generated will be worked on and
refined ready for approval.

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 POST SESSION

If all has gone to plan you should have lots more ideas than you could effectively carry out, so the
next stage is to take a step back post practical session and work through the ideas and themes that
you feel are the strongest.

Depending on your organisation and team set up this may need input from others in the group, but we
have typically found that running this as a separate session perhaps the following day is an excellent
way to approach this refinement stage. Its great for everyone to have had an evening to mull over and
think about some of the ideas that were generated. At this stage, you can start to draft out a more
formal document and start populating your content calendar with planned activity read for approval
and sign off.

Don’t forget that unused ideas can be placed onto different months or parked on future planning
sheets if you feel they have merit. Just be sure to keep these ideas and sheets somewhere safe so you
can access them easily when you next plan.

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 CONCLUSIONS

Although building a Digital Strategy Measurement Framework is not necessarily easy, it will allow us
to effectively build and measure our digital efforts and work through towards understanding the ROI
for each of our channels. Once this is achieved it becomes a lot easier to secure and justify more
budget and to continue to improve our business results.

Link to original article www.targetinternet.com

Contact us contact@targetinternet.com

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