How to plan a year of content, and stop playing catch up
There is a simple reason to plan a year of content in advance rather than making it up month to month. Venues without a plan end up playing catch up all the time, and they miss the key opportunities to get content ready when it matters. We see it constantly. Summer arrives and everyone rushes out to capture their summer content, when the truth is that content should have been shot the year before, ready to go. The venues that stay ahead are always looking one step further down the calendar.
Every key date deserves a place in your plan. Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and the rest may not each need a mountain of content, but they should each be planned in, particularly where you have a sales focus attached. That is what planning ahead really means: capturing what you need in good time, so you are never scrambling for it in the week you want to post it. Seasonality is the single biggest reason to build a yearly plan, and getting ahead of it means you are always ready.
What a yearly plan looks like
A yearly content plan can take different shapes. For a bigger client we tend to treat it almost like a scheme of work, identifying all the key areas to focus on across the year. That is not only the seasonal moments, it is the specific sales objectives too. From there we build what is essentially a project management chart, mapping the research, the planning, the content creation, the post creation and the scheduling, and plotting all of that across the year. The result is that we and the client know exactly what needs doing, and at what point in each month, well before it needs to happen.
The year is full of anchor points to build around. There are the seasonal opportunities, Easter, half terms and school holidays, Halloween if your venue does something for it, and of course Christmas. Alongside those sit your own venue specific activities, things like tribute nights, weddings and local events, each of which can attract a different audience. Once you know the seasonal moments and the sales focuses that will carry the year, everything else can be planned around them.
It takes real pressure off your team
Planning the year does more than organise your content. Working through it with an agency means you are also putting proper thought into your sales plan, and bringing everything into one document and one conversation helps you plot the next year and the activity behind it. It helps operationally too. So often the content is ready but the operation is not, especially around Christmas menus and food items, when food and beverage teams are already stretched and struggling to keep up. Having this conversation at the start of the year, rather than in the thick of it, takes that weight off everyone.
A plan should never be a cage, though. You still need room for the reactive moments that come up through the year. You might spot a month looking quiet with only a few weeks’ notice, and you need to be ready to jump on it, so we build that flexibility in. The plan gives you structure without stopping you responding to what is actually happening.
Start with the year, not the month
Getting a year ahead starts simply. Write down your sales focuses for the coming year, look at your budgeting, look at exactly where in the business you want to increase revenue, and jot down those points, topics and objectives. That list is the foundation everything else is built on.
If you would like help turning that into a full year of planned content, we would love to talk.
Book a discovery call and we will map the year out with you.
