We’ve been doing some spring cleaning around the office and not just a new hairbrush for the cats (we did get one of those too, and it’s serious business). We’ve been cleaning up a few of our processes. A great marketing strategy won’t do much if it never gets implemented. So we have focused our attention on updating a few key documents to collect details, keep us on track and prevent seemingly small tasks from falling through the cracks.

Content Calendar

This is the starting line. The content calendar outlines everything from the blogs I will write, to the topic for the email newsletter complete with publication dates. The content calendar streamlines marketing efforts with clear deadlines. These deadlines aren’t just important for me, they also help my clients know when content will be published and they guide the editing process to make sure blogs get written, read, edited and published in time. From time to time, the content calendar needs some light dusting, just to make sure the content is relevant and timely.

Monthly Report

If the reporting was a couch in our hypothetical house of strategy, we didn’t just clean the upholstery, we bought a brand new one. Our reporting process was tedious and time consuming since we need to collect information from a variety of sources (Google, Email, social media). We tested a number of products including Rankranger, Agency Analytics and Megalytic until we found one that fit how we wanted to work. The report and content calendar work together and reflect similar goals. The report will help us understand what is working (or not) for a specific client and their unique audience. We take these insights and apply them back to the content calendar. I don’t usually advise frequently changing the content calendar (that kind of defeats the point of having a plan in the first place) but every few months it’s beneficial to take a hard look at the report and make sure both are working well together,

Meeting Notes

So your report is ready to go and the meeting date is set. Now what? Take notes! I can’t stress enough how much you won’t remember from a meeting. You may think you will, but you won’t. Taking notes is a surefire way to make sure nothing gets missed from the meeting and all plans for the next month can be revisited and carried out. Personally, I love notes so not only will I write them out on paper, I’ll come back to the office and clean them up as well. Revisiting and rewriting notes helps me to organize and get a more comprehensive plan for what we talked about in the meeting. Once my notes are nice and tidy, I create action items for me and sometimes a list of things I need from a client. Once these notes are nice and tidy, I file them away until I need them again.

Remember those ‘action items’ I just mentioned, well yeah those are really just tasks. Converting these promises or commitments you made to a client into tasks that sit and wait for  a nice big check mark is the easiest way to make sure they all get done. Trust me on this one, you don’t want to get to the end of the month and feel your stomach drop because you forgot to do something you said you would.

Meeting Agenda

I know what you must be thinking, ‘how do you do anything but organize stuff!?’ I sometimes ask myself the same thing, but this document isn’t as comprehensive as the others. Actually, for this document, the best way to hold myself accountable is to just copy and paste those action items from my meeting notes. This way we talk about everything we had planned in the initial meeting and make sure all of those tasks ended up with that big, pretty checkmark I love so much.

So our house is all clean. Everything has a place and we are ready to enjoy the nice weather and great marketing results. If you’re interested in doing a little spring cleaning and marketing organizing of your own head over to our resource page to find all the tools you need, or just grab the content calendar to get started.

Roundpeg is an Indianapolis marketing strategy firm.