Plan Your Content

Here you are, well into the process of understanding how your brand translates into elements that can be communicated and over time converted into market ready products, and now the time has come to begin planning for the social media push that will help you improve awareness and generate new business connections.

For our project we began with a social media plan, which was basically an outline of all the work we wanted to do online before, throughout, and after the campaign period. We will cover the workings of that engine room in the “Execute Your Content” post later.

A Two-Track Publishing Plan
For now we just want to stress the importance of running a two-track publishing plan – one for all the pre-planned content that is carefully balanced up against the wider framework of the brand values and messages, and one for the everyday social media interaction throughout the campaign and beyond.

While we were planning what things to generally publish – categories, topics, media types, etc. – we also started discussing how our brand would work in an everyday dialogue with social media users, and we considered how we would respond to such different user segments as consumers, media, destinations, and tour companies, including what type of voice to use, what languages, etc.

All this happened inside our team of social media contributors which included members from all three main partners – Destination Arctic Circle, Air Greenland, and Visit Greenland – and all members were cleared by their organizations to spend an assigned amount of time on this specific project. This freed up a creative group of project members to streamline yet differentiate the communication across three different organizations.

Stakeholder Buy-In
With the core team in place we also sought stakeholder buy-in from the team member mother organizations and we discussed the wider framework of our social media plan with key regional stakeholders such as the Destination Arctic Circle DMO development group and core tourism businesses in the region.

At this point we were ready to start defining our strategy for reaching project ambassadors and influencer, a topic we cover in two separate posts later in this blog. Those lists of potential ambassadors and influencers were adjusted to those potentially related to the brand values since we expected these external stakeholders to help push the content in an organic and more engaged way if they felt a tie or bond with the destination and its values.

Coordinate Voices and Channels
One of the last things we did was to start testing the post-scheduling, the use of voice and the coordination across three organizations using a total of seven different social media channels on four different social networks. We also looked over our scheduled posts and reviewed them with our brand messages in mind while we did online voice tests especially on Facebook to see if we felt our choice of narrative style fit with our users and with our general channel activity.

As a last thing, on the day of the campaign launch, we employed the good old fashioned tactic of sending out a press release, both through a press wire related to the adventure travel industry, through media people we knew personally and through widespread press release emailing to media sites nationally and internationally.

All of these activities were planned ahead of their execution, and marked the first part of a two-step planning and execution framework which took us from overall brand knowledge through campaign-wide launch plan and on to the execution of the actual content we had filmed, photographed, and written in the previous months.