How to Produce a Creative Marketing Strategy

1. Introduction: Marketing Strategy: marketers have no shortage of great ideas, however, many neglect to structure these ideas into a realistic strategy to guide their approach to marketing. Hello, I'm Brian Hahnemann. I'm an adjunct professor and why you and a marketing consultant. And in this course we're gonna learn how to produce your very own creative marketing strategy. The marketing landscape is jam packed with competing messages. Yet some marketing manages to capture attention and drive results despite all the noise, like how Nike and Gillette each published popular campaigns that drove widespread conversations across social media and cable news, helping them stand out and drive sales. So what made their efforts a success? Having a creative marketing strategy in place to plan their approach more strategically and that's what you should do, is well, ah, creative marketing strategy is a plan of action that outlines the structure of your campaigns to ensure the realistic enough to execute, informed by research, your team's input data adaptable to changing circumstances and stand out due to their creativity. While every plan is distinct, I've identified the key components that the most effective marking strategies have in common through a decade of consulting on this very topic for everyone from creative freelancers to Fortune 500 companies. Throughout this class, you'll learn how to create a useful document that helps define who your audience is your goals, what messaging you'll create, what's channels will communicate on and why you're investing in a particular campaign. Beyond that, you'll learn how to justify spending time on developing a marketing strategy and how to ensure that the document remains actionable, collaborative, adaptable and creative. This class is for creative tune entrepreneurs promoting their own businesses themselves, as well as marketers at any level trying to be more strategic with their approach. If you're ready to build out your own strategy and make a bigger impact with your marketing , let's begin. 2. Benefits of a Strategy: it's common to dive into marketing headfirst without having a plan in place. So much so that a recent survey from co schedule of 3000 marketers found that only 16% of them had their entire marketing strategy documented. Clearly, most marketers aren't taking the time to develop a strategy to better organize their approach, and as a result, lackluster marketing has become the norm in many industries. The problem here is neglecting to properly research and brainstorm the right tactics as they align with your creative goals. Getting clear on the value behind creating a marketing strategy is what it'll take to justify spending the time producing this important documentation. For starters, the primary benefit of developing a strategy is defining the goals and purpose of your marketing. Taking the time to think critically about what you're hoping to achieve creatively with a particular marketing activity will help you understand what success might look like. Being creative with marketing can mean so many different things, like having a surprising approach to an email newsletter, communicating a unique perspective on an industry norm or pairing memorable visuals with your messages setting goals and your strategy from the beginning will help define what your version of creative success is, making it easier to map out the steps necessary to help you reach your goals. For example, I once worked with a streetwear brand whose goal was to develop a younger customer base and drive more sales of their latest clothing collection. With those goals in mind, our creative solution was to partner with and send free, close to a dozen younger influencers known for their streetwear style on YouTube and Twitter. What was creatively distinct about this approach at the time was directing these influencers to freely pair the clothing we provided with items from other brands as they would naturally. This was distinct from how these partnerships were typically structure in the apparel industry, which usually required creators to Onley where the brands, items and sponsored posts. It was a risky move, but it paid off. The campaign felt less sales e and more authentic as we were able to build trust through these influencers by giving them more freedom, and as a result, my clients collection sold out beyond planning that aim of your marketing. Producing a strategy is an opportunity to collect relevant data and research and use this information to support your marketing decisions. Nothing is guaranteed, but progress with marketing is more likely when you are making choices based on what advertising activities worked before and referencing the right data In practice. This means including data and research within your strategy to justify your marketing decisions. Whether that's adding analytics data from your website, the results of a study published by a marketer or maybe a report from did today, which brings up another benefit to a strategy, is that it serves as a single source of information all your marking plans for yourself and any team members. When a strategy doesn't exist or is disorganized across multiple documents in different places, there is likely to be more confusion about your marketing plants. And lastly, because marketing is often a trial and error process of testing to see what works, Ah, strategy is a place to document what tests you'll try and their outcome this way you could include a list of marking test to experiment with from the very beginning, add more as you progress with your campaigns and keep track of how each test performed documenting the performance of these tests with in your strategy will help you better identify what tactics are worth pursuing further and which ones you should discontinue altogether now, before nose diving into building out a marketing campaign, remember the value and creating a goal oriented strategy first to help guide your efforts in a meaningful way. 3. Structuring a Strategy: getting started with the marketing strategy is often half the battle. But over the years I found that working from guidelines when have a structure, the document makes it easier to begin. As you're developing a creative marketing strategy for the first time, remember that it needs to be comprehensive in order to provide the necessary level of detail to guide your efforts. Not enough detail and a strategy month not account for all the important aspects of your market. Too much detail and the document might not be realistic enough to act on. While there's no one way to format a marketing strategy, this is a universal structure that anyone can use to guide their efforts and then customize their approach. From there, I recommend structuring your strategy to address the who, what, when, where, why and how of your marketing. The Who is defying the people. You're focused on reaching with your marketing campaigns, which are your customers. In this section, you'll create personas to define the demographics of your customer base to better cater your marketing to their needs. The what is the themes and topics your messaging will focus on as a part of your marketing programming. This section is where it is important to define your strategic differentiators, which are the most creative aspects of your messaging that help you stand out from competitors. The insights included here will cover the high level themes your marketing will focus on, as well as the more specific topics to be addressed in your articles, videos or social media posts. The wen is the timeline or schedule your follow to plan produced, optimized, published and measure marketing campaigns in a timely manner, defining where is all about choosing the medium's you'll use to communicate your messages to customers. Whether that's over email, social media or elsewhere. While there are certainly many channels you could be active on, this section of the strategy is an opportunity to prioritize where your time will be spent most effectively. The why is the section where you'll describe the goals and purpose behind your individual campaigns, as well as your overall approach to marketing arguably the most important part of your strategy. This section is essential for defining a set of goals as well as what tools and metrics will use to measure if you're reaching them or not. And lastly, the how is an explanation of the step by step processes you'll take to carry out your campaigns as well as the budget, and resource is you'll need to properly execute them. This part is likely to be one of the most detailed sections of your entire strategy, as it provides a roadmap for how to take action based on all the other aspects of your plans. In the past, I've seen this section address had a Pitchess story to the media guidelines on writing compelling Social Media Copy Organizing The rollout of a new video, Siri's and more, including each of these sections in your strategy will help ensure you've got a complete plan to lead your marketing efforts and that you've accounted for all the important details . Most strategies will address all of a company's marketing in one document, but it's not uncommon for markers to create a strategy document organized a certain area of their marketing like social media. Other paper click adds content marketing etcetera. By following these guidelines, it will be easier to start building out an engaging creative strategy more quickly that you can adapt to suit your preferences as you go 4. Creating an Effective Strategy: if your strategy is unrealistic to execute, difficult to access or too rigid to evolve over time that it's not going to provide the support you hope for the's the reasons. Many Passover, the strategy part of marketing all together or stop once they've started to avoid this outcome, follow my suggestions to these challenges to produce a strategy document that's creative, actionable, collaborative and adaptable to your needs. First off, it's easy to produce a strategy that's boring and the duplication of what everyone else in your industry is doing as you complete each section of your strategy. Think about what creative elements would make it more memorable as relates to you and your company's perspective. Creativity is a critical component, as it's what differentiates your communication. They're making deliberate choices like what channels you're using and the topics you're addressing. My advice on ensuring your marketing is creatively distinct is to ensure your messaging always provides the best answers to your customers. Most important questions, whether in the form of a tweet or a lengthy video, I found this is a much more practical approach to being creatively memorable, as opposed to always trying to find a unique angle. For instance, the team behind the styling at Cloud Well created a video Siri's offering style advice for men on everything from how to wear boots to six ways to wear a blazer. The Siri's style tips for the everyday guy with clad well is conversational and offers no nonsense answers to some of their customers. Top questions about getting dressed From their perspective, they're providing the best answers to these questions through the relatable delivery of the advice on the quality of their videos. Next, your strategy needs to be actionable, as it's meant to be. A roadmap for executing on your key marketing priorities. Otherwise, it's just a document filled with ideas. As you're working on your strategy, be mindful of your budget and resource is and band with to help ensure it remains actual enough to actually get it done. One way to gut check if your marketing strategy is realistic and attainable is very reviewing any data and lessons learned from what you've accomplished with marketing before . Referencing industry standards and what others are accomplishing with marketing is another helpful way to compare where you're at to see if you're in line with others in your industry. For example, I once worked with a graphic designer looking to attract more clients to her growing business by using both Instagram and LinkedIn to reach potential prospects to ensure her strategy was actionable. From the start, we reviewed a range of other graphic designers active on social media to understand their progress on each channel as a way to benchmark our approach. Collaboration is another important consideration, as a strategy is far more effective with the collective input off the right team members and when it is easily accessible. My recommendation is to create a marketing strategy as a Google doc. That way it lives online, automatically saves changes and insures. Everyone is reviewing the same version. And lastly, this document needs to be adaptable. When a marking strategy is too rigid, that's when it becomes far less useful. One way to prioritize adaptability is to focus more effort, attention on the topics and themes, expressing your campaigns as opposed the channels and tactics you'll be using this way as attention shifts between different mediums and the effectiveness of different tactics of all, you can adapt your messaging to suit these changing circumstances. In addition, you should be planning 3 to 6 months ahead with your strategy to anticipate upcoming changes in your business industry and in the marketing landscape. This way, your strategy isn't only focus on the ones working today, but McBride's an opportunity for you to plan for what's likely to drive results in the future. Regardless of how much planning you'll do. Revisit your marketing strategy and updated as necessary every 3 to 6 months to keep it accurate and adjust it to your progress to date. Think of your marketing strategy as a living, breathing document that's never really completely finished but serves more like and always evolving road map for your marketing. 5. Section I: Why (Goals): the most important question a creative marking strategy should answer is why. More specifically, why are you approaching marketing in this particular way? What do you hope to achieve? This first section of your strategy should describe the reasoning behind your efforts by defining what your marketing goals, objectives and metrics are clarifying. The why will direct your decisions to ensure you're making mawr informed choices about where and how to spend your time with marketing. Determining the right goals, objectives and metrics is important as each provides further insight into your progress with getting your message hurt. Let's define what each of those is all about. Goals are the broad, high level results you're looking to achieve with an investment in marketing, like earning awareness for your latest product or building an audience interested in your services. Objectives, On the other hand, are the more specific, measurable outcomes you're looking to achieve as they should help you understand if you're reaching the goals that you're focused on. For example, on objective for the goal of building an audience could be increasing the visitors on your website by 20% in three months or doubling your Pinterest following by next quarter metrics are the most detailed units of measure to help determine your progress in accomplishing each of your objectives with marketing. For instance, the metrics you could look at to determine if you've doubled your Pinterest following might be the number of monthly viewers and engaged audience members you've gained over the last quarter. It is important to strike a balance between setting a few objectives and metrics for each of your goals. To understand the full benefits of your marketing without over doing it by monitoring too many data points. Let's pretend you are a marketer at the Belt company belt ology and you were looking to promote your latest products through a series of podcasts. Ads featuring the belts designer The goals you might choose to focus on or enhancing brand recognition of the company by carefully selecting the podcast. The ads were featured on increasing product sales and improving customer loyalty from mayor . You'd further to find anywhere from 1 to 3 objectives per goal and 2 to 4 metrics to help measure your progress in achieving each of those objectives to measure the goal of improving customer loyalty. In this scenario, you may choose the objective of increasing customer attention in the men's belt category by 6% year over year. Customer retention rate, churn rate and lifetime customer value are all helpful metrics to potentially pair with a subjective to help further determine its impact on this mock campaign. Now it's your turn and actions that you can take toe work on this section of your strategy is to start by selecting three goals you're looking to achieve with an upcoming promotional effort. From there, you'll further brainstorm what additional objectives and metrics you'll pair with each goal to clarify the why behind your marketing and set your strategy up for success. 6. Section II: Who (Customers): we've all experienced watching commercial or seeing an ad that wasn't relevant to us, leaving us feeling annoyed board or frustrated marketing. Onley really works when it is personalized to a customer specific needs. Now it's time to address who your marketing strategy is focused on, which is basically defining which specific customers you're looking to attract. This section of your creative marketing strategy is where you'll create your own descriptive profiles of your ideal customers known as customer personas. Thes personas will each represent a group of customers. You'll personalize your marketing to by identifying their unique demographics, interests, preferences and common behaviors based on available data, insights from existing customers and your experience within an industry. The goal these personas is toe act as a reference to God future marketing efforts. For example, if you were an artist that primarily sold screen prints depicting key moments in pop culture, the new bike created persona For Darius the first time Homebuyer and rave in the pop culture enthusiasts, you might focus on the first time Homebuyer persona, as you've noticed in the past that people moving into a new home are most often the customers buying multiple pieces while the pop culture enthusiasts is likely interested in the subject matter of your screen prints, which could help inform what cultural moments you decide to highlight with your art. Giving these semi fictional customers and Nick name and a quick tide line to describe them is the best way to clarify who they are and make it easy to quickly records them again. Beyond those initial details, it is important to brainstorm and conduct research on what demographics and behaviors you'd list to further define each of your customer personas. While there is an exhaustive list of what info must be included about each, the point here is to describe these customers and their behaviors as accurately as possible as they relate to your business. In terms of demographics, it's common defining personas, age, education level, gender, family job, title income, location, personality attributes and whatever else is relevant On the behavioral front. Consider identifying the personas, motivations, professional goals and challenges, fears, technology usage, media habits and purchasing preferences. This combination of insights can help you craft a more complete picture of the customers, your marketing, your products and services to so you can better communicate with that if we were to further expand on the mock persona of Darius. The first time Homebuyer we might identify through prior experience and research that he's 28 to 32 years old, has an undergraduate degree and an estimated yearly salary of $80,000. In terms of his behaviors as they apply to an artist selling screen prints, his goal may be to finish furnishing his home with a portable art in a timely manner. He might find it challenging to find destinations that sell art that he consider stylish, and that's offered at the right price. And in addition, he might be primarily active on Instagram and Twitter, as is the best way for him to follow the news and keep up to date with family and friends. Now some of this process is an educated guess based on your experience as to what characteristics best describe the group's you're trying to reach. But whenever possible, speak to previous customers, conduct research about your industry and review available analytics to gather helpful data to build out these profiles more accurately. To complete this section, I recommend creating between two and five customer personas to describe the different types of customers you'll be focusing on with your marketing. What's most important is that these percent is help you create marketing that's more useful , relevant and, above all, impactful to your customers. 7. Section III: What (Themes): Do you know why the clothing brand Patagonia is known for its climate activism, or why illustrator and writer Mari Andrew is recognized for her emotional art focused on empowerment, consistency. Both Patagonia and this leading independent artists have consistently shared messaging on the same themes for years. Building a genuine connection with their audience for this section of your strategy will define the what, which are the specific themes will consistently highlight in your marketing campaigns to connect with your customers and differentiate yourself. The's themes are the high level categories of topics will focus on whether you're creating tweets, writing articles, recording podcast episodes or publishing videos. The goal of consistently addressing the same themes is the same time when you sit down to create content and build familiarity around your expertise, viewpoint and values. Mari Andrew, for example, shared a doodle every day on Instagram since 2015 about the harsh realities of life to help her recover during a difficult time, she consistently post about a range of topics touching on the relatable on often complex emotions and life experiences many of us go through like being a sensitive person, navigating forgiveness and healing after a tough time. This approach has led to many positive personal and professional outcomes for Andrew. But most of all, she was able to connect with people who came to expect this type of art from her choosing the right themes to cover. Whether you're an individual, growing a business or a large company comes down to the who of your strategy, which is all about your customers. First and foremost, ask yourself, What do your customers care about as relates to your business, what interests you they have and which connect to what you offer, what problems do they face and how can you help them solve these issues? For instance, the nonprofit worldwide breast cancer noticed that most women didn't know how to properly identify the symptoms of breast cancer. Thus, the nonprofit focused consistently on the theme of identifying symptoms to encourage women to regularly check themselves to detect breast cancer early, focusing their messaging on this theme, they created visuals for sharing on Facebook and elsewhere of breast cancer symptoms represented by a dozen lemons in an egg carton. This message was universal, thus easy for a wide audience toe, learn from it and continue to associate The nonprofit is a leading expert on breast cancer awareness and philanthropy, another source of inspiration for themes worth addressing. With your marketing is identifying any gaps in your industry in terms of what topics get covered or don't also known as strategic differentiators. Thes gaps are a creative opportunity to uniquely own the conversation on a particular set of topics like how Patagonia recognized that most outdoor apparel companies focused on touting the effectiveness of their clothing, which presented an opportunity to communicate differently. Instead, the company consistently covers the environment and its well being by discussing climate change destinations for outdoor enthusiasts and the advice of experienced runners, climbers and surfers on their Blawg documentaries and podcasts. Many customers discover the brand for the first time because of its content about the environment as its high quality, aligned with their audiences, interests and genuine. Take a look at what topics others in your industry are covering to inspire what you might focus on and to get a sense of what is and isn't working in real time. It is important to note that even if other companies are already covering a particular theme in your industry, they may not be doing it effectively or from your specific perspective. Lastly, it is essential to think about what teams relate directly to your company's expertise as what you're creating content about always needs a tie back to what you do. While you've got room to be creative, you just shouldn't talk about any topic at random, as each team needs to relate back to your business. Like if Chase Bank. We're talking about climate change in the campaign. The connection isn't as clear to customers as there's no reason to expect. They have that particular expertise. Instead, Chase actually has a YouTube series called Kneading Dough, where professional athletes are interviewed about how they've navigated their own financial circumstances. This Siri's makes sense as the topic of managing your finances is certainly a knowledge area Chase Bank has, and it aligns directly with their customers needs as an action step, start making a rough list of all the topics you might want to cover with marketing as a way of brainstorming all the possible angles worth considering. Now, take a moment to reflect on what your customers care about their challenges, research, what gaps exist in your industry and what topics aren't being addressed effectively compare your list of topics to this research and then consider which of these topics aligns best with your expertise and offerings. As a business from here, you should be able to come up with 2 to 4 high level themes worth consistently addressing as a part of your marketing strategy. 8. Section IV: Where (Channels): What marketing channels are you planning to use? A blah google, Maybe Yelp, where you decide to investor time with marketing matters is you need to be active on the channels where your audience is paying attention and where you can earn results. And that's exactly what we'll address in this section of your strategy defining the wear or which mediums and channels you'll use to effectively communicate your messaging. For starters, a medium is a way of categorizing the different high level methods of communication, like search engine, social media, podcasting, print TV or email. Each has different use cases, strengths and weaknesses. To be aware of what they all have in common is providing a way for individuals and businesses to reach an audience. A channel describes the specific destinations for communicating with in a media like how linked in is a channel within the medium of social media or being is a channel within the medium of search engines To ensure your reaching your customers on a consistent basis, it's important to invest in communicating on a mix of channels across mediums. A common mistake is to try to commit to being active on too many challenge that once spreading your efforts to thin or only focusing on one channel that doesn't end up working instead aimed to be active on three channels across to different mediums to ensure you're not overextending yourself but making strategic bets on a few destinations at once. For instance, all birds e ICO friendly footwear brand actively uses its website Google ads, Facebook ads, instagram, Twitter and email to reach consumers shopping for shoes. This mix of channels works for all birds as a way to communicate their values around sustainability on the merits of their footwear to consumers at different touchpoints. Now, in comparison, a graphic designer might be active on their website. Be hands and through an email newsletter, as it's a more ideal mix for them to reach other businesses to build your mix. First, identify the mediums and channels your customers prefer to access for entertainment, news, consumption, communicating with loved ones and for job related tasks. Being active on a few of these channels increases your chances of reaching your audience where they prefer to spend their time both personally and professionally, and there's many ways to pinpoint these preferences. One approach is to focus on the age of your personas and research their generation's shared habits by referencing data from reputable sources like Pew research or marketing charts. For example, if your customer is younger, a survey on Adweek found that 37% of Gen Z teens daily video consumption is happening on YouTube, while only 12% on cable TV. While there are many nuances across an entire generation of people, the shared attributes of these age groups can help marketers better grasp their most common habits. In addition, exploring different marketing channels first hand is a straightforward approach to understanding who's active there and how they tend to use each platform. Secondly, keep in mind which mediums would best support your marketing campaigns. Certain topics could be easily conveyed across any marketing medium, while others will require specific consideration in order to be properly access by customers. For instance, highly technical topics like an engineering focus how to is typically best delivered through text on a website, be a white paper report or longer block post. Considering how a particular medium will support the topic, being discussed in your campaigns will help ensure you're providing the most seamless experience possible. Now it's time for you to take action, make a table and set it up with three separate columns. The first column is where you'll start by making a rough list of all the channels you're considering being active on in a marketing capacity from there, the next column is where you'll mark whether a significant portion of your audience is active on each channel listed in the previous column. And then the last column is where you'll briefly describe how your topics and campaigns would align with a particular media. This channel is a part of use this table as a way to double check your channel choices to ensure their right, fewer customers and, most of all, for your organization's goals. 9. Section V: How (Execution): execution is how you win with marketing. At some point, everyone has come up with an impactful idea for a campaign. But few execute on these ideas, and that's why a lot of marketing fails to take off to keep your marketing strategy actionable, The House section should plan what execution tactics you'll use to produce and distribute your campaigns to the right people. These tactics are the step by step processes you'll embrace to ensure the topics recovering across channels and mediums drive results. There's three areas to map out in this section. The first is how you'll produce your campaigns. The second is how you'll distribute them, and the third is budgeting. Your resource is start by outlining how you'll produce or structure your marketing campaigns to best communicate their message, connect with your personas and earn results in the process. The structure of a campaign involves all the high level aspects, like naming your upcoming video Siri's or deciding which themes should be addressed on the blawg this quarter, as well as the very specific details like how long each podcast episode will be, what segments will be included, who will host it and more. For example, over eight years ago, Marie for Leo, now successful entrepreneur and author, launched a video series called Marie TV to build a name for herself and attract business. Each episode is structured around answering a business related question from professionals trying to learn how to build a career more aligned to their ambitions, often in 10 minutes or less. For Leo is on camera, providing in depth answers on topics ranging from how to write better copy to finding inner confidence. Her answers are memorable because they are extensive, include relatable examples and always have a humerus angle, which is distinct from similar business. Focus content. It is clear, for Leo has a strategic focus toe how she structures her show and ordered create a useful Siri's that's distinct for your campaigns, less Talal structure, each based on the topics they're addressing and to ensure their easy for customers to access. Most of all, make decisions about your campaign structure by a me to provide the best answers to your customers Most important questions. This is one of the most realistic ways of coming up with memorable creative campaigns than align with your customers, relate to your offerings and differentiate you from competitors. The second area to account for is identifying how you'll distribute your campaigns with more competition than ever before, come up with at least five ways of promoting every campaign to ensure it gets seen A good rule of thumb. It's familiar campaigns amongst established audiences that reach your customers, like pitching your campaign toe, a trade publication, writing a guest post or partnering with a popular influencer. For instance, the Marie TV series is promoted on Facebook Instagram YouTube, her Blawg email newsletter, and whenever she has a guest on the show, they promote the episode with Third Network as well. The third area to address is determining what budget and re sources are needed to support your campaigns. Production and distribution choices reduce each step you've outlined in this section to estimate what budget, time and skills are needed to ensure your strategy remains practical enough to actually execute. When assigning a dollar amount to certain activities or listening out what skills would be required to complete a task, you might realize that some steps should be removed and that's okay as every marketing strategy has resource constraints that you need to adjust to in order to be realistic as to what's possible to achieve, especially at first for the action step. For this section. Create a list of all the steps you'll plan to execute on when it comes about the production and the distribution of an upcoming marketing campaign aimed to include at least five steps for the production and five steps from the distribution of this campaign as getting its execution right greatly increases your chances of marketing success. 10. Section VI: When (Timeline): your marketing needs to keep the attention of your customers for the long term. And that's why creating a timeline to guide your efforts is so important. The timing of your marketing expressed in the wen section of your strategy should help you set the right publishing frequency so you can consistently reach your customers. When setting deadlines for how often you'll produce, publish, distribute and measure your marketing campaigns, consider how often you'll commit to publishing content. Deciding how often to publish messaging should be a balance of aiming to engage their audience often enough to build a connection. So you're not for gotten. But also on Lee is often as you're able to reasonably commit Teoh in order to give yourself enough time to properly produce meaningful content as a part of your marketing campaigns. For example, Death Wish Coffee, a New York based coffee company, hosts its own podcast, called Fueled by Death Cast, and every week they published two new episodes. This cadence of publishing twice a week is enough time for their team to produce high party episodes while making sure they're continually reaching their audience on a regular basis. While this is just one example, there's no set schedule that everyone should commit. Teoh, as you need to decide what works for your organization and what aligns with your particular customer base, I recommend aiming to reach your customers with your messaging at least a few times a month , whether through tweeting, writing white papers, launching a Siri's or otherwise. One factor to consider when scheduling how often you're publishing content is understanding which campaigns are one off with a set start and end date and which campaigns are ongoing. This podcast from Death Wish coffee is an ongoing campaign that the company has committed to producing continuously. On the other hand, the company might also publish a one off campaign related to the holiday season or the launch of a new set of products, which aligned directly with a specific time frame. There's no right or wrong choice in terms of which types of campaigns to commit. Teoh, as most organizations have a mix of both type of marketing efforts in the works at once. Another factor impacting how frequently you're publishing are the medians and challenge your active on as the time commitment for creating different types of content does very for instance, producing two articles a week for a blawg is a different time commitment compared to publishing to podcast episodes for Spotify and stitcher each week. Each has different production and distribution needs to account for. So think about how much time you'll need as you schedule at your marketing on a timeline. Sometimes you won't have a strong sense of the time commitment of a particular marketing endeavor until you produce and distribute for yourself firsthand. And that's more than okay. My suggestion when scheduling your marketing on a strategy is a plan 3 to 6 months ahead, as best you can to properly account for what will produce moving forward, I wouldn't recommend planning further out than six months in advance, other than strategizing at a high level, as a lot can change their marketing in just a few short months to take action. Begin by creating a timeline that accounts for the marketing activities you'll commit to next month, similar to a list label each marketing related tasks and campaign in the order in which will be completed paired with a specific deadline to ensure your efforts remain organized. Remember, this timeline you're producing isn't just a set of deadlines, but a way of keeping yourself accountable to consistently reaching your customers with marketing 11. Start Strategizing: that's it. You finish this course and should now have a clear understanding of the most important parts of a creative marketing strategy. Again, I'm Brian Hahnemann, and it's been a pleasure sharing with you how to create your own marketing strategy to translate your goals and ideas into a decisive plan of action. And that's really the key. Take away. I hope you have from this course that you need to document your approach to marketing No matter if you're working for yourself or at a large Fortune 500 company. Creativity doesn't typically come from a random strike of genius, but from continually strategizing how you'll take action against your goals until you figure out what really works from setting your marketing goals, defining who your customers are and choosing a set of topics to focus on. You are far more likely to succeed a marketing with a strategy in place. Now it's time for you to produce a marketing strategy that's actionable, collaborative, adaptable and, above all, creative. If you like to stay in touch or you have any questions along the way, check out my website at brian Hahnemann dot com, where you can contact me or learn more about marketing. Thanks again, and I can't wait to see how you're marking Turns out once it's guided by a strategy.