Ruthie (00:00.814)
Funny story before we get into today's episode. I sat down to record podcasts today, and I'm like, I don't know, maybe five, ten minutes into recording this episode, take one, and all of a sudden I hear a voice in my living room. And I'm like, my God, what what is that? Who's in my house? So I hit pause, I listen for a second. It's my husband. He came home in the middle of the day randomly, didn't tell me he was coming home, and was out there talking to the dog and scared the crap out of me. So
Now I'm back, taking a deep breath, starting this episode over again. And I'm actually glad that I decided to restart because as I was thinking through what we're going to talk about today, I had some other ideas and thoughts. But what we are talking about, and this is relates to this episode, is what I had planned in my content calendar for this week. The difference between a content calendar and a marketing strategy. Here's the thing about a content calendar. I see two versions of this with business owners.
You can have a content calendar full of ideas. Like the ideas are just pouring out of you, and then nothing gets produced. Or maybe you're the other version. You've got a few ideas, but you've like rebuilt the calendar does a dozen times using a new template or new color coding or new
Ruthie (01:24.558)
Categories or ways of organizing things. I don't know, maybe that's just my ADHD brain that likes to do that. Nice, likes to perfect the spreadsheet. But either way, you're promising yourself, like I'm gonna, I'm gonna execute this content calendar, I'm gonna get this content out there, I'm gonna be consistent. And I just need to be more disciplined, or I need a better system, or I need a better strategy. Well, you do need a better strategy, but it's not the strategy that maybe you think. Here's the thing, it's not a discipline problem.
That is zero percent of the time is it a discipline problem when it comes to a business owner's content. Underneath most content calendars sit dozens of decisions that never got made. And every week that content calendar often asks you to make them all over again from scratch, usually while you're tired and maybe a little decisioned out. So today on the Consistency Corner podcast, we are going to be digging into
The difference between a content calendar and a marketing strategy and why one can't work without the other. So when we build marketing strategies here for our clients, the last thing we do in our five-phase cornerstone framework process is to build the content calendar. It's like literally the last step. I spend four to six weeks on a strategy before we even get to the content calendar.
And you're like, okay, but don't people hire you to do their content? Yes, but let me tell you why the content calendar is the end, not the starting point. Before we get to that, I want to also clarify the difference between a campaign calendar and a content calendar. Because those five phases that we walk through to build a strategy is your business goals, your campaign calendar, brand clarity, your channel strategy, and then your content.
execute content calendar and execution plan. You might be like campaign calendar, content calendar, what is the difference? Campaign calendar, think of it as like a meal plan. It's in marketing terms, it's the year's rhythm, your launches, your seasons, your projects. The content calendar is more like the recipe for what we're having for dinner on Tuesday. It's what am I posting on Tuesday? And that comes at the very end, after we've done the meal plan, right?
Ruthie (03:51.149)
But everybody wants to start at the end. And I get it, because a content calendar feels like progress you can see. It's concrete, you can color code it, you can rearrange things in the boxes, you can get all those ideas out of your head and on paper, but there's a reason it comes last and why building it last in the marketing strategy will actually lead to stronger consistency. Here's the first question, though, that the content calendar probably isn't answering for you.
Is the channel that we're planning content for? What is its job in my business? Every single channel needs a job description. And when I say channels, I mean social media. I might even mean individual platforms and profiles of social media. That might be your personal brand as the founder, the business brand, Instagram, LinkedIn, stories versus feed. Each one has a job. Email has a job.
A podcast or blog, long form content has a job. Website pages have jobs. Even referrals have jobs.
And those jobs are does this channel introduce me to strangers? Does this channel nurture people until they're ready to make a decision about whether or not I'm the right person to work with? Is this channel's job to convert the ones who are ready? That's the top, middle, and bottom of funnel. And those jobs have to be assigned to each channel so that we know what the expectations for the channel are. And once the job description
has been written, the content question changes shape. Instead of, well, what the heck should I post today? What should I talk? I talk about, you're asking, what type of content does this channel need to do its job? A calendar full of ideas without those assignments or job descriptions is like a room full of employees where nobody gets a job description.
Ruthie (05:55.287)
Everybody's busy, but nothing's moving. Like people show up to quote unquote work, but they don't know what they're supposed to be doing for work. That's a content calendar without a strategy underneath of it. Now, a lot of people, myself included, have the opposite problem from a blank calendar. And I say this with so much love because I I live here. You have too many ideas, right?
I am firmly the business owner with more content ideas than any calendar could hold, which is why I often overcommit myself to the amount of content I'm going to create because I just have so many ideas and I plan all of it, but then produce a fraction of it, or sometimes none of it, when life and business gets really crazy. And then I feel behind. I feel guilty. I feel shame around a workload that I invented for myself. Does that?
Sound familiar at all? So the struggle here is really discernment. What deserves my time, energy, and attention? Which channels deserve the time, energy, and attention? Which pieces of content are best going to serve those channels? And you can't answer those from inside the content calendar because every idea looks equally worthy sitting on a spreadsheet cell or in a calendar. Or when we're scrolling.
quote unquote scrolling for inspiration and trends. But from inside the strategy, we can answer does this content help this channel do its job, attract, nurture, or convert for the person that I'm talking to in the season they are in? Yes, it earns a slot. No, it goes to the parking lot, no matter how fun it sounds. The strategy is what gives you permission
To tell a good idea, not right now. And so this is why strategy is literally a non-negotiable. Every client I bring on starts with strategy. If it is a social media only engagement and we don't do anything else for them, we don't work on funnels, we don't work on email, we don't work on websites, we still start with strategy. Because I don't know what social media's job is until I can see the whole ecosystem.
Ruthie (08:21.922)
That it lives in. And so when somebody hires me, here's another example. If somebody hires me to call consult on ads, I'm not showing up with a here's your ad strategy, here's the keywords keywords we're gonna go after, here's the audience we're gonna target. First, I'm showing up with the question of: do ads even make sense in your marketing strategy right now? If they do, what are we asking them to do? What's the job we're asking them to do? What budget?
Does that job deserve or what budget is available for that job? Same discipline every single channel channel, whether it's social media, whether it's ads, whether it's email, whether it's long-form content. Because creating beautiful content or trending content for a job nobody defined can get expensive in money, in time, and in energy.
And listen, here's the thing about trends. They do serve a purpose. Trends can help social media content in particular fill the top of funnel, the attract job, because that's working with the algorithm, that's working with the tools to get use tactics that get the content in front of people. But if we are asking that channel to be a nurture channel or even a convert channel, maybe trends don't make sense.
Which is why we don't chase likes for the sake of likes. We don't chase followers for the sake of followers. Vanity metrics are just that. They're vanity metrics. And sometimes we do need to look at those top-of-funnel metrics when we're building an audience, when we are warming an audience. But we need to decide that in our channel strategy, which is again part of the overall marketing strategy. What do we want that channel to do in this season of our business?
Based upon our business goals, right? So we're asking the content: like, why is this content being created? Who is it for? Where is she in her journey? Which channel is it serving? And what again is that channel's job? and then maybe we've made all those decisions and we've written that content calendar, but who's creating it? When is it getting created? What is needed to get that content created?
Ruthie (10:46.328)
What happens when the person who needs to create that content has a dip in capacity? What's committed as like, this is our floor, we don't go below this, and what's an experiment? Because let's be honest, a lot of marketing is experimentation. There are dozens of decisions to be made. And carrying them around unmade or even kind of like half thought through, that's the mental load of marketing.
Every unmade decision comes back every week and asks to be made again. And often it can show up as guilt, as shooting yourself. I should have figured this out. I should have thought through this through this already. This should be easier for me. So if you're sitting here thinking, really, I don't have the brain capacity to make all these decisions, you're right. You probably don't. And that's the exact thing a marketing director in your corner carries for you.
A strategy is where those decisions get made once on purpose. So your real life in the room is to execute them because we've already written the plan. And we've written the plan knowing what the actual capacity is, what the actual business goals are. Then the calendar finally gets to do the job that it's good at holding that plan. So
One thing I want you to do before you go today, because we talked about channels, we talked about content calendars, we talked about strategy, we talked about funnels. I want you to just break this down as simple as possible. I want you to pick your main marketing channel and answer one question. What is this channel's job in my business? If the answer comes out in a clear sentence, your calendar is probably resting on real strategy. If it takes
A paragraph to explain, or you don't even know how to explain it, you found a gap. And now you've known that the whole time it wasn't about a content calendar. It was about a marketing strategy, decisions, dozens of them waiting to be made. And it was never about discipline and you getting more consistent by having a better spreadsheet. So next week, we're gonna be talking a lot.
Ruthie (13:08.387)
Deeper about the Cornerstone strategy, the Cornerstone framework, and these five phases. And I'm gonna talk you through how I took my own business through this over the summer, as well as some as some client examples, the decisions that we made in each phase, and the the things that maybe it brings to the surface that surprised even me as I took my own business through the process. So I hope you'll come back next week. And if you have questions about content calendars or marketing strategy,
You know where find me. I hang out on Instagram. You are always welcome to send me a DM over there or book a call. There is a link in the show notes for a marketing consult where we can talk about your marketing strategy and whether or not bringing a marketing director into your corner is the next right step to have someone to lighten the mental load of all of these decisions. Thank you so much for being here, and I will see you in next week's episode.
