Thank you so much for reading through this short series on my 3Cs of social media marketing: Customer, Content, and Capabilities. We have reached the last C – Capabilities. In short, what can you do? An effective strategy on paper won’t help if you can’t put it into action in your business. Read on to find out how, including an Editorial Calendar Templates. 
Remember, the point of this short series is to give you direction on creating an online strategy that works for your business. I want you to have a plan that doesn’t take all of your time and gives you real results a.k.a. SALES!!!
We’ve talked about defining your ideal customer profile and where they are online. This should point you toward the right platform to focus on. And then we talked about the type of information you want to share and some quick content ideas like Customer Testimonials.
The last piece of the puzzle is all about you. What can you do — realistically? Your social media and online marketing activities have to fit in with your daily workflow and personality. If you don’t like to write, I’m not going to ask you to blog. If you take pictures of your projects, let’s find a way to fit imagery into your strategy. If you have funny tidbits of information or daily thoughts, maybe Twitter will work for you. It is important that capabilities come last in this list because the first two pieces are so important to reaching the right customer. Capabilities should simply guide the execution of the strategy not help to mold the strategy. This is why each business needs a unique online strategy that fits this 3 Cs test of Customer, Content, and Capabilities. Keep it simple. Stay focused on the one measurable action you want your audience to complete. Measure your success and adjust accordingly.
Filling In Editorial Calendar Templates
Here’s how we use Capabilities to guide the strategy:
- Choose the ONE platform that makes the most sense based on all you’ve learned about your customer. Facebook may be the easy choice here, but let’s use my business as an example. In that case, LinkedIn is the best platform because most of my clients come to me from referrals. Knowing that about my business, I want to use online marketing for credibility and to assist in the referral process.
- Choose what type of content you are going to share — usually one or two distinctive types that match your desired goal on that platform. For me, I’m going to use LinkedIn to publish content for credibility. I also want to deepen relationships with existing referral partners and find new ones so I may share content with those target partners or just engage with them by responding to their updates.
- Here’s the big step – place these items on your calendar. This is the publishing piece of your plan. Unfortunately, many of you won’t do this, and that is where your plan falls apart. With that in mind, I have created 2 Editorial Calendar Templates — one focusing on Facebook, the other on LinkedIn along with a completely blank one for you to fill out for yourself.
Monitoring Social Media
You also need to review and respond to social media. Depending on how active you are. You may just need a few minutes at the beginning and end of each day or maybe you dedicate 20 minutes at lunchtime. This depends on when your audience is likely to engage with you and when you can engage with them. This is the last C for capabilities — what can you do? I check my profiles every morning. I also curate some interesting content while perusing blogs I like and schedule those to post throughout the day using Hootsuite or Buffer. I also have tools set up to monitor my social media activity. These tasks are not on the Editorial Calendar Templates but you need to add them to your calendar.
When you use an Editorial Calendar following this process, you will have an online marketing strategy in place that drives sales without stress. You will be free to run your business while your marketing plan is delivering real results.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/laurabcreative.