Creating Your Strategic Content Marketing Plan

The last 100 days of the year can be crucial for business owners. Not only because it’s the last window for hitting your original sales goals, but also because the end of the year is the perfect time to set up growth plans for the upcoming year. 

Although the end of the year is comparatively hectic for food businesses, it is important to review and revise your calendar for the coming year. If you are not sure of what’s supposed to be in your calendar or you’re not certain how to make all your plans become concrete actions, this is where my work as a food marketing consultant comes in. 

People come to me for help in planning out their strategies and making sure it's achievable. It doesn’t matter where you are in your business right now. We’ll start from wherever you are now and put in place the pieces that could help you to establish your brand better, communicate your message to the right audience, and make profits. I’ll guide you through the process a step at a time, but the core of your strategy lies in understanding your promotion schedule, campaign cycle, and key brand messaging.

Virginia Foodie Essentials:

• You want to look at your sales goals, but also review your mission and values first.​​ Make sure that what you set out to do and what you are planning to do are still aligned.
• It is okay for an original intention to have lived its life.
• Social media is really a reflection of everything else that you're doing to grow your business. They're not separate. 
• Your social platform should be talking about you, your brands, your community, your partners, your friends, or the cool things you've found— and all of those things should be framed with the intention of your driving a business to a particular destination.
• We're going to start where you are. And we are going to grow you into a thriving marketing ecosystem where everything you're doing feeds into something else.

Key Points From This Episode:

• The 100-Day Challenge can be your best way to commit yourself to your business and revisit your growth plans to set you up for 2023.
• Review and revise your calendar for the coming year. 
• Making a plan is sometimes overwhelming. But we do not need to start from scratch. In creating a solid strategic content plan, we begin from where you are.
• There are three important components of your strategic plan: Promotions, Campaigns, and Messaging. This is the foundation of the content (tactics) that you’ll use in your marketing plan.
• It is essential to identify what your brand stands for we communicate the right and purposeful message with every piece of content.
• Site updates, email marketing, and social media are some of the best tools to optimize to communicate your brand message.

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Transcript

Note: We use AI transcription so there may be some inaccuracies

[00:00:00] Georgiana Dearing: Your real community is the world that your target customer lives in, and it's not all moms who are buying groceries. That is too broad. What we wanna talk about is the community that is gonna be drawn to your product.

[00:00:18] Georgiana Dearing: Welcome to the Virginia Foodie Podcast, where we lift the lid on the craft food industry and tell the stories behind the good food, good people, and good brands that you know and love. If you've ever come across a yummy food brand and wondered how did they do that? How did they turn that recipe into a successful business?

[00:00:38] Georgiana Dearing: Then we've got some stories for you.

[00:00:43] Georgiana Dearing: Hello foodies. Welcome back to the podcast. This is part two of a series where I am taking a bit of a dive into the work that I do with my strategy and content marketing clients. Last time I spoke to you a bit about why I work with the brands that I do, my commitment to good food brands. And today I'm gonna take a little bit of an overview of what you could expect if you came on as a strategy and coaching.

[00:01:10] Georgiana Dearing: But this is coming to you late in September, and it is right around September 22nd, which is the 265th day of the year, and that means there are just a hundred days left in the year to meet all those sales goals that you set for your business back in January. I've said before that I've barred the a hundred day challenge from Blair Ends.

[00:01:31] Georgiana Dearing: He's the author of Win Without Pitching. It's a sales training program that he's modeled around four key conversations that you should have with your prospects and his a hundred day call to action has always been about closing open sales leads and making a final push to hit your sales goals by tidying up everything that's in your pipe.

[00:01:52] Georgiana Dearing: Now food sales are slightly different in the last quarter of the year. It's pretty hectic for your channel partners, and you should seriously check out Ali Ball's Retail Ready program for some sound advice about how to properly get your message heard at this time of year, because really the a hundred days are very, very noisy in the food industry.

[00:02:12] Georgiana Dearing: For me, I'm gonna be celebrating my a hundred days a little bit differently. Well, I'm not putting sales on the backseat this year. I'm gonna mark my a hundred days by making a real commitment to work on my business between now and December 31. That's on my business instead of in it. I don't know about you.

[00:02:31] Georgiana Dearing: If you're an entrepreneur, it is so easy to get distracted by the things that you're doing in your day-to-day business that you forget to step back and look at that big picture. So between now and the end of the year, I'm gonna be working on my business instead of just in my business. And this is not an unusual timing in the corporate world with corporate clients that I've had.

[00:02:53] Georgiana Dearing: September is the time where they really start looking at their budgets for the coming year and they start looking at what they're trying to do with those funds. And it really is kind of a split brain action going on because everyone is pushing to make that last quarter, hit those numbers. But then you're also planning for what am I gonna do first quarter next year?

[00:03:12] Georgiana Dearing: So that's what I'm gonna do. Some options for you if you are going to think about having a daily diet of working on your business is first of all, always look at closing any open sales that you have in your pipeline. You do not want to ignore anyone that you've reached. Earlier in the year, you wanna continue those conversations.

[00:03:33] Georgiana Dearing: You don't wanna let them rest. Don't wait for them to say, oh, now's the time I wanna talk to you. If you've done some outreach, go back and revisit them. Say, Hey, I'm still here. Can I answer questions? Of course you wanna close those open sales that are in the pipeline, but also you wanna revisit your growth plans, and I recommend that you do this annually.

[00:03:54] Georgiana Dearing: And just take a moment and look at what your plans are for growing the business. I'm going to be doing my a hundred days. I've actually given myself a hundred hour commitment. I am going to be spending 100 hours between now and December 31st working on my business. If you wanna join me in doing that, the way to add 100 hours.

[00:04:17] Georgiana Dearing: To your business thinking time is to start by just picking a consistent time. Pick a time of day that makes sense for you in your day to day. I like to do it first thing in the morning because just like exercise coach, we'll tell you if you get it done in the morning, you don't have to think about it for the rest of the day.

[00:04:37] Georgiana Dearing: So I'm gonna be working an hour every morning. Then you have to block it on your calendar like it's a real appointment. Make an appointment with. And guard it against all those other things that are gonna come up and vie for your attention during the day. And then the next thing you need to do is shut your door.

[00:04:54] Georgiana Dearing: If you have one, if you got an office, go into it. Shut the door. Make it apparent to everyone around you that you are working. If you look like you're interruptable, you will be interrupted. So that's my first tip, is just make a commitment, block it on your calendar, and then enact that commitment and make it an hour.

[00:05:12] Georgiana Dearing: Be strict with yourself so that you don't let it bleed over into other things. The other thing is how to use your time in that hour that you committed. I would say use a specific notebook or a file open one place where you're keeping all your. Keep all your materials in one place. I'm a big fan of boxes and stuff.

[00:05:31] Georgiana Dearing: If you've got pieces of paper and research and stuff that you're doing, put it all in a folder or a box or something that you can close up when you're done, and you can open it up and be right back where you left off the day before, and then use the full hour start and stop and then shut it down and move on to the rest of your day.

[00:05:48] Georgiana Dearing: And that way you're giving yourself this little habit of really paying attention to your. and then as things come up during the day, you don't have to act on them cuz you think, oh, I can deal with that in my hour that I've given myself tomorrow. So how do you get started? You got these hours blocked out.

[00:06:05] Georgiana Dearing: I'm gonna give you some really quick tips in the very first day brain dump. Literally get it outta your head so that notebook or file that you're using, start the clock and start writing. Write it down, all of it. It doesn't matter if you can repeat yourself, don't really care. Do a big brain dump. Just get it out of your.

[00:06:25] Georgiana Dearing: Then the next day, go right back to it in that second hour and review what you did the day before and start organizing it. You wanna rearrange things, find common threads, and literally take everything that you wrote the first time and move it onto another list. So if you wrote about email at four different points during that brain dump, take all of those email things and move them into an email.

[00:06:50] Georgiana Dearing: If you wrote about retail stores, put all your retail store notes into one list. Just start organizing that brain dump and so that you have sort of common problems that you can tackle. Do as much organizing as you can until you get to the end of that. Sometimes this sparks another little journey of brain dump.

[00:07:10] Georgiana Dearing: Don't interrupt that flow. Make sure that you capture all of these thoughts in these early sessions, and then when you're ready and you've moved everything out of your head onto paper and then into categories, take an hour and prioritize. Prioritize what's important. You realize that some of these things you don't need to do.

[00:07:28] Georgiana Dearing: Now, some of these things you can table for later. Some of these things are great ideas, but you don't need to address it until spring. So make yourself a little spring tickler and reminder and say, yeah, I'm gonna look at this later, but just sort of prioritize what's really urgent. What do you really, really need to make your focus for next?

[00:07:47] Georgiana Dearing: And then after you've gotten all of this out of your head and on paper, use an hour to review your sales goals and see what you need to do next. Now, if you're gonna use this entire a hundred days just for closing all those sales, the rest of that time, if you've done your brain dump and you've sorted your common threads and you've prioritized the things you need to address, you should have gone through that pretty quickly in like 1, 2, 3 session.

[00:08:12] Georgiana Dearing: In that fourth session and moving forward, just give yourself that list of things to do. Line up your tasks and start chipping away, Adam, if you have someone you really want to work with, do that outreach now and then go ahead and schedule that follow up before you even wait. Reach out and say, I'm gonna look back at this next Friday if I don't hear from him or next Thursday.

[00:08:33] Georgiana Dearing: Just give yourself regular intervals where you are. Working the plan, marking things off your checklist. However, if you're like me and you're going to use this for a big global look at your business and think about next year, that hour four or that fourth step in onward, you really wanna look at strategy and planning.

[00:08:53] Georgiana Dearing: So definitely you wanna look at your sales goals, but I'm also gonna suggest that you circle back a little bit and look at your mission and values first. Do your mission and values, do they still jive with your current vision? I mean, sometimes you put these sales goals out there because you think that's a number that you need, and then you also have this mission and set of values.

[00:09:14] Georgiana Dearing: It's real easy for these to get out of sync. It's real easy for your mission and grow, grow, grow, grow, grow to kind of have differing pressures. So as a time annually, just take a moment and say, am I being true to my. Or did I pick the right mission? Have I really become passionate about growing my business in a different way than I thought I did when I started?

[00:09:37] Georgiana Dearing: And it is okay for an original intention to have lived its life. So review your mission and values and make sure that what you set out to do and what you are planning to do now, still kind of line up with each. Then take a really hard look at your sales goals. Ask yourself, did I set realistically achievable sales goals, or do I need to adjust my growth?

[00:10:03] Georgiana Dearing: That will take some financial brain power, but it's also just real easy to set a target that you just can't hit. I'm gonna give a really brief description of this, but if you want to double your business, I'm gonna pick easy numbers, right? But if you're selling $24,000 a year and you want to double that to 48,000 a year, what you don't do is say, okay, I've been selling 2000 units a month now.

[00:10:32] Georgiana Dearing: In January I'm gonna sell 4,000. You will just never hit that 4,000 units. What you need to do is have planned growth, and you do it sort of just like that old compound interest. You go, let me set my growth to be 30% over what I did last January and 30% over that. And as you add those 30 percents over and over again, you will reach your doubled sales.

[00:10:57] Georgiana Dearing: But it's a ramp instead of a leap up to the next level. So look at your sales goals and ask yourself, are they realistically achiev? And then look at your product plan. Do you have the right mix? If you're trying to earn a huge amount of money, like if you're trying to earn a hundred thousand dollars off of your homemade product, which you're only selling a $4 product, that's a lot of stuff to move.

[00:11:22] Georgiana Dearing: So do you have the right mix of products that are gonna help you reach the income goals that you've set for yourself? And maybe you need to adjust your product line in your offering, or maybe you need to adjust what your goals are. Really, it is sort of a back and forth. So this is some deep thinking that you're not gonna be able to solve in one hour at a time.

[00:11:42] Georgiana Dearing: You need to sort of work your way through some of these questions and highly recommend bringing in financial advisors when he gets down to the money story. I am not a financial advisor, but I will say to you that taking time once a year to stop and look at your intentions in your plan and make sure that they're in alignment is a very, very useful and powerful thing to.

[00:12:06] Georgiana Dearing: Once you've done that work, now's the time to really look at your actual actionable plan. That is when you review and revise your calendar for the coming year. This is where I normally come into the relationship because people come to me with tactics that they're trying to get done, but you really wanna understand your sales goals and what you're trying to do with your business.

[00:12:32] Georgiana Dearing: And then when I say the next step is looking at your calendar, we're gonna start by mapping out those goals onto your calendar. Do you have your promotions scheduled in, or have you been operating in a reaction mode to promotions? Do you have campaigns that are aligned with your sales goal? And are the things that you have been thinking about doing in the coming year realistic with what your business plans?

[00:12:59] Georgiana Dearing: So I typically am brought in with the tactics part. Oh, I need help with email, or I need help with social media. And this is where my segue from those a hundred days or a hundred hours of work is gonna transition into me talking about how I work with my clients. Because if you come in to work with me on your email or social media, I'm gonna take you back to your strategy and your goals and take a look at all of the pieces of your business.

[00:13:27] Georgiana Dearing: The other thing I'm gonna do is I'll say, we're gonna begin where you. I'm not a person who's gonna come in and just strip everything away and make you rebuild it all from ground zero up because you don't have the mission right on your website where your sales goals are just not set. We're gonna start with where you are and if social's the thing that gives you the most grief, we can begin right there.

[00:13:50] Georgiana Dearing: But I will tell you honestly that social media is really a reflection of everything else that you're doing to grow your business. They're not separate. Your social platform should be talking about you and your brands, or your community, or your partners, or your friends, or the cool things you've found.

[00:14:09] Georgiana Dearing: All of those things should be framed with the intention of you're driving a business to a particular Destin. So my approach is really holistic. We'll be building all the pieces of a solid strategic content plan probably over the course of our first year together if we're gonna do one-on-one work. But we may not begin at the beginning and end at the end.

[00:14:31] Georgiana Dearing: We're going to start where you are and we are going to grow you into a thriving marketing ecosystem where everything you're doing feeds into something. If you look at a fully fledged plan, if I put the plan that we're working towards up and said, we're gonna be doing this, it's overwhelming and it's too much to manage if you take it all on at once.

[00:14:52] Georgiana Dearing: But we're going to start with where you are and then we're gonna start improving everything just by a percentage at a time. By the time we get through a full year together, we'll have covered all the stages and decisions that you need to make in a. And this time next year, you're gonna be looking at that plan and going, oh, how do I revise this instead of making one from whole cloth?

[00:15:15] Georgiana Dearing: When you've established your sales goals, we wanna know what channels you're gonna grow and by what percent to reach those goals. That's the thing that we need to know, and when we know that, then we can start putting your marketing plan together. And there's three components to your marketing strategy.

[00:15:34] Georgiana Dearing: When we're talking content marketing and communication strategy. There's your promotions calendar, there's a campaign calendar, and then your big buckets for content. You're messaging is those big buckets of what do you say about your brand? Once we have those put together, then we're gonna be mapping out your content.

[00:15:54] Georgiana Dearing: We're going to figure out what site updates we need to do, what emails we're gonna be sending, and how are we using all this content in your social campaigns. So when I ask about sales goals and I talk about promotions, I'm gonna say that I want you to think about what can you afford to give. Discounts and flash sales.

[00:16:15] Georgiana Dearing: They're not panic moves, and I see small brands doing this all the time, and I say this all the time over and over, but honestly, most of you are on sale too much too often. And I say this because I know that the emails that I get are always saying that you're 15% off. And I think, why do you have a retail price?

[00:16:32] Georgiana Dearing: Just make it 15% off. Move from. So we want your promotions to be planned and be part of your strategy and part of your budget, and something that you've worked out with your financial advisor. Like what can we afford to give away? And then the other side of the puzzle is how do you get more efficient at doing what you're doing so you can have that margin be as big as it can possibly be.

[00:16:55] Georgiana Dearing: And I wanna put a little plug in here for my friend Sarah Delavan, mostly because she's been talking a lot over on her podcast about taking charge of your relationship with your wholesale partners. You actually don't have to let them drive the discount train. They will come to you and say, okay, we want you to run this much off at this time, and you can push back and say, well, here's what my promotion calendar looks like.

[00:17:20] Georgiana Dearing: How can we make that work with your plan so you can, and you should be in charge of when your products go on sale. But you need to have a solid plan so that you have the confidence to deliver that message. Work your promotions into your calendar year, work them into your timeline and into your product pricing.

[00:17:40] Georgiana Dearing: What can you afford to give away? And that's why I ask about your promos. When we start any content plan, email, social, web, any of that, we want you to plug those in first and plan for. And then we're gonna plan around how we speak about the discounts that you give, including that little giveaway that you give people for joining your email list.

[00:18:02] Georgiana Dearing: All of this should be a strategic thing and not like some wacky idea. Why don't we try it? It needs to make financial sense for you. And once we have those big promotions mapped out, then we're gonna look at just a general campaign calendar. And what I mean is any other effort that you're gonna do that may cost you marketing dollars if there's a time of year, and I will tell you the time of year, you should have a push to grow followers before your big selling season.

[00:18:31] Georgiana Dearing: So if there's a time of year that you wanna grow followers or you wanna get more people drawn to your brand and you wanna do maybe a t-shirt giveaway or something, we have to buy those shirts somewhere or have them produced, and you're probably gonna have to spend some money boosting these posts to get those people outside of your normal network.

[00:18:49] Georgiana Dearing: Those go into the plan on the calendar. These spends are investments and they should come from your budget and they should have real targeted purposes for why you're spending that time and money. We've looked at your promotions and we've looked at your campaign calendar, and now we're going to look at your messaging strategy and that's those big content buckets.

[00:19:09] Georgiana Dearing: If you've gone through any of my social media training, you'll recognize the content buckets for food brands. We start with four big ones. It's a great place to start. You all have these buckets of information, and the buckets are your mission and values, why you started and what you value most particularly, you good food brands out there.

[00:19:28] Georgiana Dearing: Your mission and values should be something you're talking about all the. Product in your ingredients, right? You wanna talk about your product selection or your ingredient selection, or your partners that you're using to source your ingredients. So that's another bucket. And then application is in use, really technical marketing term is application.

[00:19:48] Georgiana Dearing: But in the food space, that's gonna be recipes, entertaining ideas, gifting ideas, things that people would do with your products after the. And then the fourth bucket is your community. And your community is not you, , it's definitely your neighborhood. If your local, small, regional, you can speak to all of your things that are happening in your community and you can talk about your staff, things that are of interest to them.

[00:20:15] Georgiana Dearing: Definitely that's part of your community. But your real community is the world that your target customer lives in. And it's not all moms who are buying grocer. That is too broad. What we wanna talk about is the community that is gonna be drawn to your product. So your community might be home chefs, your community might be exercise buffs.

[00:20:40] Georgiana Dearing: Your community might be people on special diets if you're a keto product. You're gonna speak to the keto community and living a keto lifestyle and all those other things that go along with not just buying your product, but living in that space where your product is important to your consumer. So those are your four big buckets.

[00:21:01] Georgiana Dearing: And this is where you think about this a little bit strategically. Well, not a little bit, but definitely strategically, you want to frame out what you're going to be saying within these four buckets. What are the key points that you want to continuously hit that define your brand, that set your brand apart from others that make you.

[00:21:23] Georgiana Dearing: We've got your promos, your campaigns, and your messaging. That's your strategy Now, your content is your tactics and the content that you're gonna be creating for this marketing calendar. We're gonna talk about site updates, emails, and social campaigns. So site updates, first and foremost, you need to have some kind of blog post go up regularly because these Boost Organic SEO search engines are looking for sites that are updated regularly.

[00:21:52] Georgiana Dearing: That's not a set it and forget it space anymore. If you invest in building a website and then don't touch it for three years, you are not going to get the benefit of that investment. So when I say blog posts, I'm talking about blogs as a website function and not personal journal. Blogging is a way that content is organized on a webpage, and you can use them for news updates.

[00:22:18] Georgiana Dearing: You can use them for recipes, you can use them for instructional content. It's just a way of framing these regular monthly updates and it's fodder for your email newsletters, right? If you're gonna put content out on your site, you're gonna use it in an email newsletter and drive people. Other things are landing pages.

[00:22:36] Georgiana Dearing: Landing pages, capture leads. These are highly specific content pages, and they leave the viewer with only one action. So you give them a page of information and then the only thing they can do is maybe sign up for an email or express interest in wholesale, like click through to year RangeMe page or send you an email that says, I'd love to carry your product.

[00:22:58] Georgiana Dearing: Something about sparking wholesale interest. Or maybe you're selling a service, maybe you have an add-on thing because you are a micro brand, you're selling very regionally and you're gonna do a wine pairing course to pair your chocolates with wines, or you're gonna do bake with Me, something like that.

[00:23:18] Georgiana Dearing: Some service sale where you've maybe done a webinar and you want people to pay. So those are landing pages. It's the page that is like a very narrow funnel. It's got all the information on it, and you can do one action, which is do it, do this thing. And then other pages that you can be updating, you're about page as you flush out your mission and values or as shit, things change.

[00:23:40] Georgiana Dearing: Or maybe you have a history page, you wanna update those. It's your about page, your ingredients, talk about your ingredients, your partners. You can talk about your partners, definitely your store locator and where to find. Definitely gonna do a news item if you're in a new store. And then product descriptions, your product collections, and seasonal offerings.

[00:24:01] Georgiana Dearing: These are all things that you can be updating and using strategically to kind of highlight different things at different times of year, and that will boost. And so site updates is a thing that you wanna map into your calendar because you know what your promos are. You know when you're running campaigns and you know what's gonna happen over the course of the year around your brand.

[00:24:22] Georgiana Dearing: So then you can start planning for when you're gonna be doing some website updates. Then you can plan your email marketing. We're a hundred percent sure you should have a monthly newsletter. You should send an email once a month to remind people that you were there. And you newsletter should be more letter than news.

[00:24:37] Georgiana Dearing: A little bit personal, but not too lengthy. And not every email has to be about a sale or to sell an item, meaning putting that item on sale. You don't have to discount anything. You can talk about a product without also saying it's 10% off. You can talk the why. You wanna be more like, why we make this product this way, or why we chose to do this, or, here's a memory of grandma's table and that's what sparked this thing.

[00:25:04] Georgiana Dearing: And you can learn more about this product here, those kinds of things. But they don't need to be super long. Recipes. Recipes. Recipes. Send out recipes. People like recipes, product notes. Like I said, you can talk about ingredients. You can say, did you know why we choose this ancient grain? Any of those things.

[00:25:23] Georgiana Dearing: Entertaining ideas. Mother's Day is coming, here's something you can cook for mom. Things like that. Then the other type of email that you need to have is those real promotions and sales emails, and those should be planned outside of your newsletter. You plan them based on your promotions calendar and campaigns that you're running.

[00:25:43] Georgiana Dearing: Here's two right off the top of my head. Holiday Sales and Earth Day, earth Day Flash Sales are great for organic products that are made based on regenerative farming. Anything that's close to the earth, you could do an Earth Day flash sale and say, we're gonna do a deep discount This. And then if you're a giftable item, you should be doing some kind of a holiday campaign.

[00:26:04] Georgiana Dearing: Doesn't necessarily have to be coinciding with Thanksgiving weekend, we are finding more and more people are okay with earlier planning, and so you could consider running your sale a little bit earlier than Thanksgiving weekend. The third part of your email marketing is your retention emails. You have to have something in there that is going to continue communicating to people who have bought from you once.

[00:26:30] Georgiana Dearing: It's the after the sale, so you could be doing a, how'd you like it? Give us a rate in any review request after a purchase, or, Hey, you bought this pasta. Here's a recipe. Or then tried and true if you like that. Maybe you would like this. You wanna have some kind of retention email campaign in place. So we've covered site updates, email marketing.

[00:26:53] Georgiana Dearing: The third thing I'm gonna touch on today is social. Social media, as I said, is the third one and the last one, and this is because it should really be a reflection of what you're already doing elsewhere. So if you're writing a newsletter, it should be a blog on your website. So you put a blog page on your website, you send an email newsletter out, telling people to go see it, to go read it, and then you talk about that topic two or three times over the course of a month in your social media and ask people to sign up for email.

[00:27:26] Georgiana Dearing: You can do a product highlight. You can write about a product, and you can post about that product one or two times. It really depends on the volume of content that you're pushing out. If you're just growing your posting habit, then I would just say once a month, highlight a product and a partner.

[00:27:41] Georgiana Dearing: Highlight once a month, highlight a partner. This is our vendor partner, or this is a channel that we're. Whatever you're doing. Always befriend your friends in your social campaign, and then you are gonna have some kind of a promo or campaign or something that'll give you two or three posts to put on your social media.

[00:28:01] Georgiana Dearing: And whenever you block those promos into your calendar, then you've got some social content that you can post at the same time. The rest of the year, you gonna map in those big buckets of content, your mission and. Talking about your ingredients or your products or your sourcing, where you get those things.

[00:28:19] Georgiana Dearing: Application in use, right? Show those recipes and your community speak to your community about things that interest them. So I'm gonna just recap really quickly the things that we covered, but these are the things that you get out of working with me. We work on strategy and then we work on content, and then I coach you through getting this stuff enacted so that you can manage.

[00:28:44] Georgiana Dearing: All year long with minimal input from high dollar creatives, we should say. We wanna get it in a system where you can manage it because you wanna be doing targeted, repeatable, and manageable marking all the time. So strategy, we're gonna look at your promo calendar. We're gonna look at your campaign calendar, and we're gonna look at those big messaging bucket.

[00:29:07] Georgiana Dearing: Those are the three things that we're gonna map out. What is your strategy? How do you talk about your brand? And when are you going to invest in communication that is going to drive you towards your sales goals? So that's the strategy part of it. And then the content is mapping out when we're gonna make these changes, how are we gonna get pictures shot?

[00:29:27] Georgiana Dearing: What words are gonna go with what pictures are gonna map that out over a whole year. And once you kind of go through a whole cycle of year, then you've got a. That you adjust and adapt over and over again, and that is how we kind of calm the chaos of all the things you should be doing. That said, I've been speaking very, very specifically to consumer communications, but your wholesale communications are gonna run right in line with what you're doing with consumers.

[00:29:55] Georgiana Dearing: Speak to those two audiences a little differently, and the timing may be slightly shifted because if you're gonna be speaking in the present tense for consumers, you might be doing advanced communication to your wholesalers to sort of tee them up for having the products and having the things that are seasonally appropriate when you're speaking to your consumers in.

[00:30:17] Georgiana Dearing: I know that's overwhelming, but honestly it was six things we talked about promos, campaigns, and messaging for your strategy and website, email and social for your content plan. And that is a wrap today. It's been a long marketing Monday, and for whatever reason, my voice is so, so dry. So thank you for sticking with me through this whole episode.

[00:30:38] Georgiana Dearing: And if you like my podcast, please like it, leave a comment, follow, share it. It really helps me out. And as. Thank you for listening. Thanks for listening. And if you wanna learn more about how to grow your own food brand, then click on Grow My brand@vafoodie.com. If you're a lover of local food, then be sure to follow us.

[00:31:00] Georgiana Dearing: We are at VA Foodie on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Join the conversation and tell us about your adventures with good food, good people, and good brands.