7. Planning for a Robust Content Engine
- Sai Ganesh Ex-Head of Brand, Dunzo
The basics of content planning are having a clear brand charter and an annual goal, along with a rough idea of where you want to be one, two, and three years from now.
From there, you can double down on quarterly and detail the route to get there with BAU work or business-as-usual work, which is on a weekly sprint basis. For Social Media, we do a 30-days planning period.
It’s important to build a robust content engine that’s constantly churning out content for each of your channels for different personas.
However, one of the things that you have to be careful about as a marketing leader while planning content is to give your team enough time to work on ideas rather than rushing at the last minute.
Of course, some things will be rushed, like print ads. But, say, a campaign like Dunzo Daily takes time. That campaign took us six to eight months from the time we started with the consumer persona, tested the concepts, and built the scripts.
It takes time to analyze insights and create content.
For planning, I also have this philosophy that you need to cook for the kitchen and for the soul. That means that you should frame your goals and OKRs so that 70% of them are for the business and 30% are for the team and their portfolio, and you need to plan for this 30%.
You need to give creative people on your team more incentives to work only on your brand and miss out on the opportunity to work on many brands, like at an agency. We've seen that allowing your creators or social media team the space to do work for the soul, work they are proud of, typically yields much higher benefits for the brand itself.
For example, our viral Friendship Day campaign was actually a solo project of one of our illustrators. We told him to come up with something that he’d put in his portfolio.
He worked on it for three months, jammed with us, looked at different examples, and finally came up with the campaign. To create great art takes time.
There’s this very famous Oreo tweet from the Super Bowl. It was supposedly two years in the making. When we look at it as consumers, we think it must have been a moment of genius, but it actually took two years to come up with it.
They had these very elaborate daily content calendars across social platforms. This system was set up to engineer virality, and then, when the moment happened, it happened.
I can’t overemphasize enough the importance of giving time for great creative work. This is also why you should hire a good project manager for your content team. Their responsibility is to plan for everyone else.
Just ensure that even when you're planning a social media calendar, only 70% of it is planned. For the remaining 30%, it is okay to be unplanned.
We keep this 30% bandwidth free. We ensure our days are manageable because there is a huge benefit in working on moment marketing, on what is trending that day or that week.