Creating a Marketing Calendar
Your marketing calendar serves as your road map to your complete Facebook marketing schedule for the next year. Keeping a close eye on your calendar helps keep your campaigns on schedule.
The most efficient way to build your calendar is to use a program that can store the actual messages you plan to post on Facebook. A spreadsheet is one way to accomplish this.
Here are some types of information you should include on the calendar as Facebook posts:
• Sales and promotions of your products and service. This can be a 10 percent sale on all blue shirts, or $7 ties for anyone whose name is John. Get creative. Plan your online sales to complement your offline sales.
• Lighthearted posts to elicit humor. Use jokes and funny pictures to get a response from your fans. Your posts don’t always have to be about the business. Consider posting a picture of a dog or a baby doing something funny. Schedule these as the need arises to break up the monotony—once a week is a good idea.
• Contests. Contests are a surefire way to drive traffic to your site and build your fan base. Schedule these on a monthly basis.
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Be sure to clearly indicate on your marketing calendar when promotions start and end. Additionally, be adamant about tracking as many data points as possible so you know what is working and what is not. This will help you to refine your marketing plan in the future for things that are not working well.
• Other creative items such as video, live appearances, and so on. Think of your marketing calendar as your main resource for all the things you’re going to do to sell your products/services on Facebook. Anything that comes up, make sure to slot it into the calendar.
Scheduling Posts
When scheduling the frequency of your posts, it’s best to limit them to no more than three times per week. If every post generates a big fan response, you can gradually increase the frequency. Additionally, don’t post more than one sales promotion per week. Any more than this and you’ll come off as being very sales-oriented and you may lose fans.
People are most active on Facebook on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, so these are the best days for promotions. We talk more about your content strategy and other days and times to post in Chapter 5.
Figure 3.4 shows postings on a marketing calendar from a dry cleaner. Notice that the business has scheduled up to three postings a week, mixing questions with promotional messages and jokes.
If you sell a line of pies to quick-service restaurants, school programs, and bakeries, you probably already have a marketing plan for selling those pies. In your marketing plan, you probably send out emails, postcards, and sales sheets; go to tradeshows; and make calls on a weekly basis.
Here’s a sample marketing schedule for promoting three different kinds of pies:
Notice how you promote all pies via email on the first and fifteenth of the month. And you promote all of them again using a postcard on the fifth. You can use Facebook promotions to fill in the gaps in the marketing calendar. And because Facebook is so easy to use and many promotion strategies are free, you can promote individual products rather than bulking them together.
If possible, format your marketing calendar so that it shows your Facebook promotions on a weekly basis. Keep in mind, however, that not every action you take on Facebook will appear on your calendar. For instance, you might not schedule a Facebook post for Monday, but if on Monday a fan replies to one of your posts, or she starts a post, you need to reply to it promptly. Facebook users expect speedy responses to their posts.
Make time in your schedule to check your Facebook page for posts and to reply back as needed. It’s a good practice to do this three times a day. This process doesn’t need to eat up a lot of your time. We recommend that you give yourself 15 minutes several times a day to review and reply to posts.
Additionally, always leave a spot open each week for breaking news. It’s okay for these kinds of in-the-moment posts to trump your scheduled posts because most of the time they bring even more attention to your page than any promotion could. It’s the nature of people to want to know something important that just happened.
Here are a few breaking-news examples:
• The softball team your business sponsors wins their league championship
• One of your employees receives a community-service award from a local charity
• A local citizen decides to run for state office
• Your local high school football team hosts a home game against a major rival
• A terrible storm is heading for your area
• The Chicago Cubs win the World Series
Each of these may grab the attention of your fans and ignite some hot conversation. Is this off the topic of your business? Sure. But it’s part of building relationships on Facebook. Get to know your fans.
Similarly, you need to be willing to jump outside of the plan you created when special circumstances introduce themselves. For example, if a tornado just hit a small city in your part of the country and ravaged all of the buildings and homes, you should be willing to adjust your marketing schedule to mention the event.
A business might post the following after a disaster hits:
• Our hearts go out to the many lives that were lost.
• Want to help with the recovery? Go to www.redcross.org.
• In times of difficulty, our humanity compels us to help one another.
Deciding on Topics
When it comes to deciding on what topics to post about on Facebook, separate your topics into several categories:
• Informational and educational content
• Questions and polls
• Promotions
• Lighthearted topics, jokes, and other humor
Mix this up to fit the scope of your business. Post your content at the same time each week. Having a formula makes it easy for you and your team to generate posts, and your fans know what to expect. People like predictability. It’s what keeps them grounded and organized.
Figuring How Much Time to Spend on Marketing
Most businesses spend about four hours a week or less managing their social media presence. We encourage you to schedule a minimum of four hours into your weekly plan, but you should plan to spend more time on your Facebook marketing campaign when you’re first getting it up and running. As you grow and start to do more business online, the required amount of time in a given week will also increase.
Think of Facebook as another marketing format—along with newsletters; radio, TV, and print advertising; conferences; and anything else you to do to promote your business—and give it the same amount of energy you give to these other marketing efforts.