“It's always good to kind of map out or at least have a good understanding of your buyer journey when somebody's first getting to know you and they're in the awareness stage and then they move to the consideration stage and then they move to the decision stage, where the content you're creating fits into that and what the purpose of each piece of content is in facilitating that buyer journey.” - Kaitlyn Merola
Intro: Tell me if this sounds familiar. You know you need to publish a blog post or a video or a newsletter, but you have no idea what you're going to talk about. And this isn't the first time it's happened to you. You definitely have ideas, but you can't think of anything at the moment. That's why you need a content calendar, and that's why I've brought on Kaitlyn Merola to tell us all about them.
Kaitlyn runs an agency where she manages content calendars for multiple B2B clients. So she understands how complicated that process is and, most importantly for us, how to streamline it. Now in our conversation, we go deep on how to plan, organize, and execute on your content and social calendars, which are different. By using a centralized content calendar, we cover a ton of topics.
But here are my favorite takeaways from our conversation.
First, we define a content calendar as a central place to plan, organize, and track all of your content efforts across different channels. It helps provide direction and alignment for your content strategy. And most importantly, Kaitlyn says that the content calendar, or the editorial calendar, as she'll call it, is different from your social media calendar, which needs a little bit more flexibility and openness.
Now, a couple of episodes ago, we talked to Lauren Gaggioli about SEO, and we touch on it in our interview or this conversation as well. For SEO purposes, prioritizing quality over quantity, publishing one high-quality blog post per week is often better than a bunch of low-quality daily posts that, cough, cough, might be generated by AI.
And finally, this one was mind-blowing to me. I think I knew it on some level, but hearing her say it really helps drive the point home. Map your content to the buyer's journey and the stages of the buyer's journey which are generally awareness, consideration, and decision-making to ensure it serves the right purpose at each stage.
You don't want to hit somebody with a piece of sales content when they're not even problem-aware because it's not gonna land for them, and it might leave a bad taste in their mouth. Like, you're only out there to sell, and this is really about people. Alright? I think the last few weeks, especially of this show, have talked about how we're leveraging technology and AI to help people. So we cover a lot more in our conversation, which you can find over at [streamlined.fm/42] if you want all of the show notes and resources.
In the members-only show for Streamlined Solopreneur Accelerated, we talk about repurposing. And I get on my high horse a little bit about why AI is not a good writer. And, well, spoiler alert, Kaitlyn also has opinions about that. So if you wanna get that ad-free and extended again, that's all going to be over at [streamlined.fm/421].
Welcome to the Streamlined Solopreneur, a show for busy solopreneurs to help you improve your systems and processes so you can build a business while spending your time the way you want. I know you're busy, so let's get started.
Joe Casabona: All right. I'm here with Kaitlyn Merola, the CEO and founder of Move Marketing. And I'm really excited to talk about this because I don't think it's something that we've talked about at least in some time here. Maybe like, 2019 or 2018, like, when the show first started, pre-pandemic, whole other world. First of all, Kaitlyn, thanks for being here.
Kaitlyn Merola: Of course. Thanks for having me.
Joe Casabona: No problem. Super excited. Let's dive right into it.
Kaitlyn Merola: Totally.
Joe Casabona: What is a content calendar?
Kaitlyn Merola: Oh my gosh. That's such a big question. So what is a content calendar? It is really meant to help guide how you're approaching your content strategy. So it's a tool at the end of the day. At Move, we have content calendars for all of our clients. We have since Day 1. It's super helpful for us. It's super helpful for our clients to understand the approach we're taking to their content strategy for the month, for the quarter, to provide a forward looking place where they can see, okay, these are the curated themes, concepts, topics that we wanna hit in the quarter. Maybe it's not fully fleshed out or it's not totally set in stone. Of course, it's always fluid. But it gives you a starting place, and it gives you sort of that tool that you can galvanize around and understand what your goals are from a content perspective for the month, the quarter, even further out. Some of our content calendars go out as far as 6 months.
Joe Casabona: That makes perfect sense. I think people hear content calendar and they think, alright, I need 365 different items and I need to, like, divide them up and, like, I need to do, like, deep keyword research, right? I just had my friend Lauren on talking about SEO. I guess, like, on a more granular level, when we talk content calendar, is it like log post? Is it social? Like, what are we talking about as far as, like, overall content strategy goes in relation to the content calendar?
Kaitlyn Merola: Yeah. So in our minds, kind of the way that we structure our content calendars is all encompassing of blogs, long form ebooks, guides, white papers, anything that we wanna use as a lead generation tool, collateral for sales enablement.
A lot of times, we're having constant dialogues with our client sales teams as well, and they'll kinda raise their hand and say, hey, we need a one pager on this particular feature of our product or we need this or we need that. Those items also falls into our content calendars. Anything related to webinars, webinar abstracts, webinar scripts, video scripts, anything really related to content. And that could be all encompassing of different mediums. So anything that is really related to your content strategy that you're gonna wanna push out through your digital channels, that's really what we wanna make sure is encompassing within your editorial calendar.
And that also fuels what we're providing or what we're populating in our social calendar as well, which in our world, we keep that separate from our editorial calendar, which is a content calendar, basically. Because a lot of the content that we're providing or that we're producing through the editorial calendar, we can repurpose for social. And so that calendar is kept separate, but they're linked at the end of the day.
Joe Casabona: Cool. I love that. I was gonna ask about that. Right? Because first of all, like, you already started to name a bunch of things that I might not consider in a very narrow definition of a content calendar. I'm like, alright. Blog posts, YouTube videos, podcast episodes. But ebooks guides, lead generation webinars, really smart. Right? Because if you're gonna do a webinar on something, then you probably want, like, supporting content around it. You wanna, like, hype it up a little bit. Right? Is that kind of the idea?
Kaitlyn Merola: Totally. And we're big believers too in repurposing. So if we do a webinar on something, let's repurpose that into some written form of content. Let's repurpose it into different clips for social. Let's repurpose it into a web page on your website specific to that particular topic. We're big believers in really maximizing every piece so you're not reinventing the wheel every time you're sitting down to produce a piece of content. Use what you have. Use what's working.
Make sure it's data driven too. Like, you don't necessarily need to always be coming up with content to create from scratch. Look at the data from previous content, which pieces had high engagement, which pieces generated the most number of leads, and repurpose that. Maybe say that same thing in a different way or maybe reframe that topic for a different persona. Really think about that too because that helps with kind of continuing your content strategy on an ongoing basis.
Joe Casabona: That's really smart. Right? Because I think about as the content creator, you can sometimes feel like you're beating a dead horse. Right? Like, I talk about don't use episode numbers in your title so many times. Like, surely everybody's heard that. Right? But maybe there's a different framing for it or my most popular content right now is how I've configured my stream deck. I feel like there's, like, a gold mine there, like, how podcasters can leverage Stream Deck, how live streamers can leverage Stream Deck, stuff like that.
Kaitlyn Merola: I'm thinking too about where your users live online. So some people really might follow you and engage with your content on LinkedIn, whereas others might instead engage with your content and visit your website more often. So it's kind of making sure that messaging is everywhere and reinforced across all of your channels in different ways that helps to fuel your content calendar throughout the quarter.
Joe Casabona: I love that. And then I also appreciate that you mentioned that you used content and editorial calendar interchangeably. Right?
Kaitlyn Merola: We do.
Joe Casabona: t's different from the social calendar.
Kaitlyn Merola: Yes.
Joe Casabona: You kinda said why, but can we get, like, a clear reasoning on that?
Kaitlyn Merola: Yeah. Let's say we have a blog in the editorial calendar. We've produced it. We've collaborated with our client on it. It's approved. It goes live on the website. We take that blog. We really maximize exposure for that blog by creating several LinkedIn posts for it. So we'll have a LinkedIn post for the day that the blog goes live, its release day, and then we'll have future LinkedIn posts kind of teeing up different sections of that blog, pulling out stats, pulling out specific things from that blog that are heavy hitting that people might not see if they don't read the blog in its entirety. Most people skim. We know that. So really maximizing the readership of that blog by continuing to post it in different ways and then measuring engagement to see, okay, pulling this section out of that blog and posting it to LinkedIn worked really well. We're gonna do that next time. So that calendar functions a little bit differently.
And the social calendar also is a little bit more dynamic in that it allows us to be reactive too. So our clients and ourselves sometimes we'll see something, sometimes our clients will see something, and they're like, oh, we wanna re share this, or we wanna post this today, or this press release went live, we wanna post it this afternoon.
Our social calendar is a little bit more dynamic, so we can react to those things quickly, get those things done same day, and then record that in the SocialCal to make sure that we have a recording of the fact that that happened. And then we can look at that SocialCal retroactively and kinda see everything that happened that quarter, the reactive posts as well.
Joe Casabona: Gotcha. Okay. So, like, you say, maybe a good example of this from a recent experience for me is this is why I need a better both social and contact calendar, I think. Are you on LinkedIn? You're on LinkedIn?
Kaitlyn Merola: Yeah.
Joe Casabona: You get, like, a bunch of comments that are like, hey, I really love what you're doing. You should hire me. Right?
Kaitlyn Merola: Yeah. Definitely.
Joe Casabona: That's the sent from InMail. Right? And so I posted something on LinkedIn that was like, hey, I just met you and this is crazy, but and then, like, I rewrote that pitch sent from InMail. Best performing LinkedIn post for me in a while. Nothing to do with podcast coaching. But maybe using kind of like your reactive framework here, I might be like, hey, last week I wrote this post and it blew up. Here's how you can better pitch sponsors as it relates to podcasting. Maybe it's something like that.
Kaitlyn Merola: Exactly. Yeah. Like, really building on the strategy and then making sure it's all reflected in the social cal so you have a record you can look back on and kinda be like, okay. I was just operating on LinkedIn in real time, interacting with people, resharing, reposting things, and that's how you wanna do it. But you want to have a place where you can see all of that activity so you can then build on that for the following quarter. You can see what worked well or what didn't work well. The social cal is a little bit more dynamic in that way than our content calendar.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. And then the recording part. Right? Because otherwise, you're either leaving it to memory or like a third-party service. I can use, like, the free Taplio Chrome extension to see what my popular posts were, but, like, recording it somewhere easily referenceable, probably a little bit better.
Kaitlyn Merola: Yeah. And there are things too that we'll do, like, AB testing or like different experiments on LinkedIn. We'll use LinkedIn ads. We'll boost. We'll sponsor. We'll do all different types of things on LinkedIn. We'll build a LinkedIn newsletter, engage with LinkedIn groups that are relevant. There's a lot of activity happening beyond just posting to our page.
So all of that, we wanna really have, like, a full picture of, like, what we did and what we achieved through that effort so we can replicate what worked and pivot away from things that didn't. And it goes just beyond posting.
Joe Casabona: I feel like I'm getting a lot of ideas here.
Kaitlyn Merola: Good.
Joe Casabona: We've mentioned repurposing a couple times in the Streamlined Solopreneur Accelerated. I would love to chat with you about maybe how you're leveraging AI, if at all, to repurpose the content, if that sounds good to you.
Kaitlyn Merola: For sure.
Joe Casabona: And if you want to hear that conversation as well as get every episode ad-free and extended, you can head over to [streamlined.fm/421]. All of the show notes will be there as well as a link to become a member. That's [streamlined.fm/421].
Okay. I love everything we've set up here. I guess before we get into kind of, like, the big question I have, let's level set. How much work really goes into creating a content calendar?
Kaitlyn Merola: It depends on the tool that you're using. So we use Airtable for our content calendars for all of our clients. That is helpful to obviously have, like, a tech enabled content calendar where you can color code things. You can have drop downs where you can select the content type, etcetera. You can customize it to your liking. Every company is different. Every industry is different. The fields of information that appear in your content calendar are different depending on what's important to you, what you need to know when you're looking at the content calendar.
So ours kind of vary for all of the clients that we work with, but it's definitely nice to have a tool that you're using. Using a G sheet or an Excel file, that can get really clunky. It's hard to update, especially if you have a team you're working with and you're all kind of looking at the same place for the same information. It's really nice to have one that's tech-enabled and gives you that dynamic ability to change things on the fly.
I think it's really important too when you're creating your content calendar and you're thinking about putting it together initially, what are those pieces of information?
So for us, it's the title or the headline of the piece, the content type. Is it a blog? Is it a guide? Is it an infographic? What is it? The channel that we're planning on distributing that piece through social, website, email, a paid ad, whatever channel we're planning on using to get that message out, the audience. So a lot of our clients, most all, have pretty well defined buyer personas and target segments. So we'll pick from there which buyer persona it's meant for and then a quick outline, like a quick abstract just so we don't forget weeks later kind of what that piece was meant to be about based on a client conversation that we had or something we saw a competitor wrote about that we wanna kind of also provide a perspective on. Whatever the idea was, we'll have like, a little field in there too that we can put those notes in so we know when that arises on the editorial calendar weeks from now, we could pick it up, produce it.
Joe Casabona: What did I wanna do here? Yeah. I love that. For our listeners, I've been using a great little app called Whisper Memo.
Kaitlyn Merola: I've heard about one.
Joe Casabona: It's really good. It's for iOS. I mean, it uses like, OpenAI's Whisper thing, but you just, like, talk at it and it fully transcribes. And I think it does a pretty accurate transcription. And then it'll email you that or you can easily, like, do something with the text. I really like that. It's a little bit you know, as far as, like, voice notes are concerned, it's a little pricey at, like, $40 a year. Okay. But if you use it a lot, right, like, if you do, like, 2 notes a day, right, that's, like, less than 50¢ a note. And if it's, like, really worth it, I'm doing a little test because I've been really big into, like, the let me dictate while I'm walking around the backyard and my children are like, running around, like, full speed into stuff. I wanna see if just regular old, like, phone dictation is good or if Whisper Memos is, like, markedly better.
Kaitlyn Merola: Totally. Yeah. I mean, even the fact that you're thinking about wanting to have a means to jot your thoughts down as you have them, that's the first step.
Joe Casabona: I went, like, super extra for a while where I would like talk into my phone and it would send that information to Zapier and then Zapier would send it to Airtable. Kind of continue on your point. So to summarize your point, it depends, but a lot of stuff kind of goes into the platform, how you want to create it, and there's the title, the outline, different personas, which I think is really smart. Like, if you haven't defined your own persona, your business' personas, you're probably gonna struggle to do this at all because, like, you don't really know who you're writing for. Right?
Kaitlyn Merola: Right. Yeah. You need to have that sort of blueprint that map of, like, okay. We have these 3-4 target segments. They each are gonna engage with our messaging differently. We know that based on their demographics, their firmographics, and their characteristics. We wanna make sure we're creating enough content for each of those personas throughout the quarter so we can really maximize engagement with each target segment. That's a nice starting point to then start to build your content calendar from there. So that's always reflected in all of our content calendars. It's like, well, who is this for? That's a key question. If it falls between one of these personas or it's not really meant for anyone in your buyer group, what is the purpose of the piece? And if there is a purpose for the piece that is separate or unique or different, that's fine too. But you have to define that, and that helps a lot.
Joe Casabona: That is something I struggle with. Right? Because, like, my audience is podcasters and solopreneurs who are, like, spending too much time on stuff. I wanted to write about how I, like, deleted the mail app from my phone which I know, not like the default mail app because, like, 2 factor authentication, but, like, I never checked that. It was like, Spark. Which is the one that I would, like, chronically check. And I wanted to write about that because I thought it was interesting, but I'm like, this doesn't really belong on, like, my main content site. I put it on, like, medium and my personal blog. But, like, I'm not promoting it. I'm not pushing it. I'm not making a big deal of productivity is like an adjacent thing for me, but I'm not like a productivity guy.
Kaitlyn Merola: Yeah. We had a client once who wrote a short blog article, I guess, you could call it. It wasn't necessarily that, but he had done an experiment with ChatGPT when it first came out. And he was like, this has nothing to do with anything that we're pushing in terms of messaging or marketing materials, but it's really cool, and I want our audience to see it. So it was like, okay. Let's throw it online. Let's start to promote it. Let's see. Like, let's see if people just engage, like, a human level to the fact that he did this on his own time. It's not really, like, business-related, but it was interesting.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. Exactly. And, like, I mean, from, like, a content point of view, tools, blog posts, at least in my space tend to do well. Yeah. People, oh, what apps are you using? Right? So, like, those personal pieces are, like, fine for that. It's really interesting. It's hard to figure out. Now, we're gonna talk about this later. But you mentioned, like, multiple platforms. Do you generally recommend marketers will call it like an omnichannel approach?
Kaitlyn Merola: Yeah.
Joe Casabona: Email and social. Right? But, like, blog, YouTube, live streams, webinar. Like, do you recommend, like, all of that, or do you generally recommend people focus on, like, where their people are at?
Kaitlyn Merola: Definitely focus on where your people are at, for sure. But that's to say, everybody kind of interacts with the Internet differently these days. I mean, it's so custom to you how you're gonna interact with a brand. Right. So it is important to be everywhere that you think your buyers might be online. So it really requires thinking about all of the different channels. Like, if you have a blog and you wanna post it to your website, post it to Medium too.
If you have something that's doing really well in an email campaign, create an ad campaign for it too. A lot of that repurposing and reinforcing just to make sure all of your bases are covered and everyone who's doing different things online and has different patterns will see your brand where they are spending their time.
So definitely an omnichannel approach is the way to go, and that's so much easier said than done. But once you get into the rhythm of it and you start to see how repurposing really is the way to do this because you write it once and then you slice it, you splice it, you change it, and you use it in different channels, and then you can measure results on that, that's where you're gonna figure out kind of where to, like, double down.
Joe Casabona: I like that a lot. It's funny because, like, at the beginning of the year, I had an episode called, This is my Be Everywhere Strategy. And I was, like, you know what? I'm just gonna publish on Medium, on my blog, like on Substack. I'm gonna put the videos on YouTube and on Substack. That became untenable quickly. Especially because, like, Substack is a very closed off platform.They make it easy to get things out of Substack. They don't make it easy to get things into Substack. So like medium, right, you can like feed it a URL and it'll import the story and it'll mark your blog as like the canonical one. Can't do that with Substack. You can't give Substack like your podcast RSS feed for it to import. I was basically like, alright. Well, now my VA has to publish here and there and Substack now, and is the juice worth the squeeze?
Kaitlyn Merola: That's why a lot of our clients come to us because they're like, we know we need to do this, and we need to have data coming in to tell us where to invest our marketing dollars. Can you guys just do this and be on top of it? You guys are the ones that are kind of managing the integrity of all of this and monitoring all the channels. That's why a lot of our clients come to us because it can be just a lot of work.
Joe Casabona: It's a lot. I love automating, and Substack is just not an automatable platform. And also, like, again, when I devised this plan, I thought, oh, well, maybe Substack will be like a good place for me to make money. And then I decided it's been a wild quarter for me.
Kaitlyn Merola: Sounds like it.
Joe Casabona: To, like, sunset my membership because, like, I'm in a mastermind group, and they were like, how much mental energy do you spend on your membership and how much money does it make? And I'm like, lots and not lots. I basically sunsetted everything but the pro version of this podcast. Right? The paid version of this podcast because that's easy. Right? Like, I just don't insert the ads and we talk for 10 extra minutes. I release maybe like a bonus episode here and there. Everything else was just I'm spending like half of my Friday creating a super long article and maybe a video for ones of people to see.
Kaitlyn Merola: Well, that's another thing. Like, that's a great point. You have to understand the investment you're making and what you're expecting to gain from that. You have to be willing and ready to kind of sunset things, pivot away from things, maybe revisit them in another quarter or so should you feel that that's necessary or the right decision. But you have to, like, be fluid with where you're spending your time and really follow your users where they are and not get too wrapped around the axles with, like, well, I have to do a blog, this this this this. But don't worry about that. Just get the content onto the Internet and start to see what happens, and those decisions will kind of start to reveal themselves to you as you do that.
Joe Casabona: I like that. And I feel like this, like, segues perfectly into the next portion of the episode. But I do wanna point out that maybe this is especially important because you also mentioned paid ad campaigns, right, as part of the content calendar. And you definitely don't wanna fall into the fallacy of the sunk cost with, like, a Facebook ad campaign or something like that. Right?
Kaitlyn Merola: Exactly.
Joe Casabona: Well, this has already been, like, an action-packed episode. We're gonna take a quick break for our sponsors, and then we'll come back and I'll ask the big confrontational question. So we'll take a break, and then we'll be right back.
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Joe Casabona: And we're back. Okay. So, Kaitlyn, you just said we gotta be fluid. We need to be responsive. Why can't I just publish what I want when I think of it? I had an idea for a blog post today. I wanna write that blog post today and publish it.
Kaitlyn Merola: Yeah. I think that a good content calendar, one that is dynamic enough to accommodate that, means you can do that. That's okay too. A lot of our clients are like that. They'll be like, hey, we wanna respond to this this week. So push everything down in the content calendar and slot this in for this week. And we can do that quickly. We can be right there with them and take that, run with it. That's important too. Content calendars are not to say reactive, responsive, in-the-moment decision-making on things that you wanna write about are, like, not something you can work in.
Joe Casabona: It's not a textbook.
Kaitlyn Merola: Exactly. Move it around. Scrap this idea, put a new one in. Like, that is part of it, and it gives you a place to do that so you're not so scatterbrained kind of, like, doing this content on the fly that's so hard to do if you don't have a place you can put these ideas into and be like, okay, I wanna respond to this. I'll do that next week. I already have this in here for this week. Okay, cool. Now I can just operate and just produce, and I don't have to worry too much about the plan.
Joe Casabona: That's really the big benefit of the content calendar. Right? Is it's not for the times when you're like, teaming with ideas and you just wanna write it up. It's for the times where you sit down and you're like, I need to publish something today, and I have no idea what it's gonna be.
Kaitlyn Merola: Yeah. It's like a backlog of ideas that you can pull up to the surface and then continue to produce.
Joe Casabona: Now you mentioned, like, putting things in Airtable and kinda logging those ideas. Logging ideas is one of my favorite things to talk about because this is very much like, here's how I do it. Maybe you'll get some ideas. It's never prescriptive because everyone's brain works differently. I'm just kinda curious. How do you capture ideas?
Kaitlyn Merola: So we have our content team. They're fantastic. They are sort of always keeping their finger on the pulse as it relates to our clients' competitors. What are competitors writing about? What angles are they taking? What events are happening in our clients' spaces, in their industries. What are the themes and the speaking sessions that are happening at those events? What are trending topics, trending patterns within relevant Linkedin groups that are specific to the space that our client might be in. They're always absorbing information and understanding what's trending and what topics are sort of rising above the noise. And then we're doubling down on that and saying, hey, mister client. We wanna write about this. Here's the angle we wanna take. Here's why.
And there's always a reason for it. It's not just coming up with content because we have to because we have to fill up this content calendar. That's never the goal. It's always kind of figuring out what would work based on what we're seeing in the space that they reside in and how they wanna position themselves. Do they wanna be a disruptor in their space? Do they wanna be the authoritative sort of they've been in their space for 10 years and they wanna remain the leader? Depending on kind of how the client wants to be positioned is also a big consideration.
Joe Casabona: That's a really interesting one to me, that positioning. So I wanna come back to that. But first, I wanna ask, let's say you're taking a walk. I don't know where you're based. I'm based here on the East Coast where we are finally getting nice weather.
Kaitlyn Merola: I'm on the West Coast just north of Lake Tahoe.
Joe Casabona: Okay. Nice. Nice. So is it generally nice there? Is it, like, too hot or anything?
Kaitlyn Merola: Yeah.
Joe Casabona: Okay. Cool. Taking a walk on a Saturday, you are hit with inspiration. How do you capture that? Where do you go? Where do you put it?
Kaitlyn Merola: Before I put anything into a content calendar, I'll take a note of it. I'll text myself. I'll write it down somewhere, and I'll kind of, like, let it marinate a little bit before It gets put into the content calendar. To me, it's sort of like more of an official move to put it in the content calendar. I have to have a little bit more of a fleshed-out idea or outline for it before it gets recorded in the content calendar for next week, for next month, whatever. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll kind of just have a posted note with the idea that I had. And then I’ll kind of revisit it, sleep on it, sit on it for a day. And then if it's, like, okay, this is still really valid and, then I’ll do a little bit of research, and this makes sense, then I'll put it into the content calendar, and I'll pitch it to the client.
Joe Casabona: Nice. I like that. And I wanna key in on something you said here, which is I'll text myself, I'll put in a post it note. I, again, over-engineer my whole life. I do something once and I'm like, this could be automated. And I'm like, that's not how you show me stuff. It's terrible. Again, I'm like, I gotta over engineer this system where it's like, oh, I press the action button on my phone and a list comes up. Or like, I don't know, things is open and I just put it into things and it's in the inbox and I'll see you later.
Things 3 which is like my current and favorite task manager. Like, ask me again tomorrow how I feel. But I like that you're not like, oh, I set up this system where like in Apple Notes or Simple Note or like whatever platform you're using like all of my ideas have to go there because the more barriers you create, the less likely you are to do it. Right? I love that. Okay.
Now, I wanna come back to this like how does the client wanna be viewed? Because this is something that I struggle with. Right? I think by and large, people will tell you that I'm a nice guy. And I am. I am a nice guy. I'm not like a jerk. I'm candid. Some people mistake Kandor for being a jerk. So I'm nice, but I'm also direct. And sometimes I want to give my full opinion on something, and I'm worried that it will come off at, like, angry white guy yelling about something.(You've sighed heavily. I feel like you've thought about this before). Is this accurate?
Kaitlyn Merola: Yep.
Joe Casabona: Say I'm your client. What do you say to me in that situation?
Kaitlyn Merola: To me, that's definitely a part of your brand. So let's think about your brand. Let's do a little bit of a branding exercise. Let's do a digital whiteboarding session. How do we want your users to feel when they interact with you in any way across any channel, any episode? How do we want them to feel when they're interacting with your brand? Do we want them to gain insights? Do we want them to feel empowered? What do we want them to take away? And then you can back into sort of how you kind of need to come across or how you need your brand tone and your voice to sound. So that's sort of how we've done it before with clients where they're like, hey, we wanna come across this way, but our current content does not reflect that. How do we get from A to B and get there so we are seen that way? And that's the whole movement. That's the whole challenge right there in and of itself.
Joe Casabona: It's almost like a not a rebrand, but like a little bit of a rebrand. Right?
Kaitlyn Merola: Kind of.
Joe Casabona: I saw someone on one of the social networks say, like, whatever publicist Mark Zuckerberg hired is killing it. And they posted a picture of him, like, surfing with, like, this full sunscreen white face and then, like, a picture of him, like, fighting MMA style. He, like, reimagined himself, basically, from, like typical nerd to, like, MMA fighter.
Kaitlyn Merola: It's crazy. Like, we had a client just recently be like, we wanna come across a little bit more approachable and funny, humorous. Where's the line? What's funny but not too funny?
Joe Casabona: Right.
Kaitlyn Merola: What is funny enough but also informative enough and educational enough? We want our content to also be important, not just funny. So there's this whole exercise you go through to kinda be like, how do we get to that place for the client, but also still hit our OKRs, hit our goals, make sure that the content is relevant and important to our users. There's a lot of that that goes into that.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. It's funny because it's something I struggle with. Like, again, I feel like I'm pretty approachable. Approachable and funny is probably me. Like, I've been described as, like, a real life cartoon character. But again, like, if anybody has ever seen me get angry angry, they're usually like shocked by it.
Kaitlyn Merola: Yeah. Right.
Joe Casabona: And I'm not saying, like, I get angry online, but I do worry that if I am speaking more directly or more candidly, it will be viewed as, wow, Joe's being like a real jerk today.
Kaitlyn Merola: Yeah. I feel like everybody struggles with that. I struggle with that too. It's like I need to push back on this. I need to say it in a way that feels like we're all on the same team still, and we're all driving towards common shared goals, but that's not a good use of our time.
Joe Casabona: Yeah.
Kaitlyn Merola: Sometimes that can be hard. For your own personal brand, how do you be direct without coming across as a jerk?
Joe Casabona: Right. Maybe like taking some time. I have a really good example of this from very recently as we record this. The founder of Morning Brew, Alex Lieberman, said, “unless you're on a list celebrity, big media company, or plan to sell your audience a high dollar product, it makes no sense for you to launch a podcast right now”. I originally responded with, well, this is like typical Twitter engagement bait where you say something that's very polarizing.
Kaitlyn Merola: Like controversial.
Joe Casabona: And then, like, you caveat it hours later after the algorithm picked it up. And I deleted that, and I instead said, like, fun fact, when Morning Brew launched in 2015, people were still saying email and newsletters are dead. And if you have a good idea and it happens to be a podcast, like, do it. Right? And so that went from, like, me just being like a dickhead. I don't know if that earns me the explicit, I'll have to ask my editor. To, like, me, like, stating a fact and then, like, being more encouraging where it's, like, he's telling people to not start a podcast, but he started a newsletter that he sold for 1,000,000 of dollars at a time where people were like, emails dead. Again, yeah. It's like something especially, like, on social media,
it's so easy to just, like, send something off into the ether. Awesome.
So, there are a couple of terms that you mentioned that I want to define before we move into, like, cadence and timing. One was you said demographics and firmographics. What are firmographics?
Kaitlyn Merola: Firmographics are characteristics of the person's job title, the company, the size, the industry, like their firm, their business where they're at.
Joe Casabona: A firm like the firm, not like firming up some sort of
Kaitlyn Merola: Like the firm.
Joe Casabona: Not firm like heart.
Kaitlyn Merola: Yeah.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. Got it. Okay. And then OKRs. What are OKRs?
Kaitlyn Merola: Objectives and Key Results. OKR’s are like your goals, your metrics that you wanna hit. They're like KPIs.
Joe Casabona: Like you maybe said earlier, KPIs is, like, another way to put it.
Kaitlyn Merola: Cool.
Joe Casabona: With that, I feel like we've done a lot of table setting. We're like, moving on to dessert if we're gonna stick with this table setting. But let's talk about like, timing and cadence. Right? Because you said a good content calendar is dynamic enough to accommodate maybe being more responsive and fluid for certain content. But also, like, I can imagine that gets to a point where it's like if you're bumping some topic every week, it's like how Jimmy Kimmel would always say, we couldn't get to Matt Damon. Do you remember that gag on his show? Right? Like, at some point, you're eventually gonna have to not bump the next content for whatever you're feeling that week.Right?
Kaitlyn Merola: Exactly.
Joe Casabona: How much does timing matter in the content calendar? Is that gonna be like, more specific to the content you're creating?
Kaitlyn Merola: It definitely does depend, but we have found kind of the sweet spot. So all of our clients are B2B. So in a B2B setting where you're really managing, like, a company's profile on LinkedIn, we have found on LinkedIn specifically, like, 3-5 posts per week. And, usually, we'll have at least 3 that are planned, and it gives us still that flexibility to have 2 or 3 that are reactive or responsive to something.
Joe Casabona: Nice.
Kaitlyn Merola: And then for the content calendar, for a true SEO driven strategy where you are trying to organically improve your rankings for specific keywords in that given month or that given quarter, we usually do like, one blog a week, and then we'll mix in other kind of content items, like long forms, infographics, 1 pagers, that kind of stuff kinda in the mix as well. But one blog a week usually suffices to impact SEO the way we want to.
Joe Casabona: Okay. Cool. Very cool. This is very similar in line to I'm, like, gonna break the 4th wall a little bit here, but I interviewed for 419, my friend Lauren Gaggioli. She said something similar, like, weekly, maybe, like, every 2 weeks at most if you wanna, like, markedly improve, like, if you have, like, a big, like, juicy blog post every 2 weeks. The big takeaway is, like, you don't have to blog every day.
Kaitlyn Merola: No. It hurts you after a certain point because the quality of those blogs can only be so high if you're writing a blog every 2 days.
Joe Casabona: This is a point that I didn't get to Lauren that I'm glad we get to address now. I feel like we've kind of been trained on what social media wants and have, like, transpose that to, like, apply that or overlay that across all content. And that's just not the case for, like, website content or SEO. It's like that's really where quality matters.
Kaitlyn Merola: It really is. Like, you have to have an authoritative, almost blunt headline for a blog to really get the juice it needs for SEO, and that requires research. It requires citing stats and citing sources that make sense and backlinking. That takes time to put together a quality blog that Google will see and crawl the way you want it to. You can't do it like you're on Instagram and you're just like posting every day. It can't be like that for good reason. If you're blogging too much, there's no way those blogs are of the quality that you're looking for.
Joe Casabona: I guess I think about, like, in college, I thankfully learned very fast that you could write a paper the night before. You shouldn't, but you could.
Kaitlyn Merola: Exactly.
Joe Casabona: My master's thesis, I couldn't write that, like, the night before, I had 3 credits. Actually, I had 6 credits that was supposed to be a year long project dedicated to that because it was assumed I was working on that every week.
Kaitlyn Merola: Yeah. Which you were.
Joe Casabona: Until I had to defend it.
Kaitlyn Merola: Yeah. Yeah. Right.
Joe Casabona: Actually, fun fact about my master's thesis. My adviser wanted to get it published in an academic journal. And so instead of having until like, April to do it starting in August, I had until December to do the whole thing so that we could get it published In an academic journal, which we did.
Kaitlyn Merola: Oh, gosh. That's awesome.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. You would think it was smooth sailing for the 2nd semester, but it wasn't. I like, added more stuff to it. But definitely kind of the difference between like, the social content versus the longer content.
Kaitlyn Merola: Exactly.
Joe Casabona: Cool. Alright. So as we wrap up here, it still sounds like a lot of work, obviously, like B2B clients hire you to do stuff like that. If I'm a busy solopreneur and I wanna create one without spending too much time on it, maybe what are like the 2-3 things I should consider? Where should I focus my efforts? Stuff like that.
Kaitlyn Merola: When I first started and I was a solopreneur before I built the team and kind of four and a half years ago now, I used a Gsheet in the beginning, and it was a really easy place. It was super editable. It wasn't techie in any way. It was just basically a stream of consciousness that these are the things that I wanna hit for this client this quarter. This is so subject to change. It's basically like a brainstorming doc, but it gave me that place. So when I was speaking with that client, we could pull it up and be like, okay. These are my ideas. What are your ideas? Let's riff on this. So I would just say having a singular place where even if you're writing down, like we mentioned earlier, like, on a post it or you're texting yourself something while you're out and about, like, living your life, you have one place you can bring those things back to. Even if it's just a Gsheet, that's important.
And then making sure the columns in that Gsheet or if you are using a tool, the fields that you have for each record are important and clear and valuable. Even if it's just three fields, it's the headline, the outline, and the persona. Even if it's just that to get you started, and then you can move into the production cadence and see how long does it take me to produce a quality blog that is optimized for SEO. Does it take me 8 days? Does it take me 28 days? How long does that take me? And then you can start to build out the frequency and the cadence based on your own bandwidth that you have to kinda dedicate to it.
Joe Casabona: I love that. I think that's great. You know, again, I do something very similar. Right? Well, for this podcast, I have a content planner. What I don't have is one content calendar for everything, And I think that's kind of a function of this show being slightly detached from my actual, like, target audience. And so I'm working on kind of bringing them together at like, a very glacial pace.
But I have a table in Notion called live stream schedule that could easily just turn into content calendar. Right? Because I do have what I wanna live stream about every week, I think, to I forget now if I said that while we were recording. In case I didn't, I could take this topic and make it the topic for the week. Right? And like you said, you're big on repurposing. I could do the live stream. I can turn it into a blog post. I can turn it into an email. Right? I mean, ideally, what I'd probably wanna do is write the email first and then mention the live stream in it. If you wanna hear more about my thoughts, like, join me for the live stream, submit your questions here, like, that sort of thing.
I guess for me, it's starting with this key piece of content, And this really just came together for me recently because I was like, when I did live streams when I was a programmer, it would just be me like programming. Right? and talking through what I was doing.
Now, I'm like a coach. I'm more of like an information, like, content creator kind of person. I'm like, building in public doesn't work for me anymore because what am I building really? And so I switched to these more like informational topics. And again, like that just kinda dawned on me very recently. And I'm like, oh, this is coming together. So I'll let you draw your conclusions from that point and maybe, like, pontificate some advice based on my experience if that works for you.
Kaitlyn Merola: Yeah. I mean, we've definitely experienced working with clients and even internally at Move. We wanna do this. We wanna do that. We have this over here. We wanna start this stream of content over here. We wanna start a LinkedIn newsletter that's different than our blog, and this is different than this, and there are all these different channels and mediums, and we wanna do a webinar, we wanna do it like this, and that can get really clunky super fast. Again, it's really nice.
Kaitlyn Merola: Like, our legacy old content calendar from years ago was a Gsheet with like, 4 tabs at the bottom. You could pull up the different tabs, and it would show you exactly what that ecosystem looked like in terms of the content plan for our webinars, for our blog, for our LinkedIn newsletter. That was helpful still to have it all in one place even though we were approaching those things differently. So that's how we did it. And now we're in Airtable, and it's a lot more, like, tech enabled and dynamic, and that's cool.
Joe Casabona: You can have like, different views. Yeah.
Kaitlyn Merola: Even just doing that is a good place to start.
Joe Casabona: This is how my brain works like, calendars are my love language. I'm on the record on this show as saying that multiple times. I really like Notion for that reason. It's like you have, like, this one table that you can say, oh, like, alright. Show me what the calendar looks like. And, like, that's not as useful for this show because this show comes out every Monday, and so I don't really need a calendar view for that.
But, like, if I'm publishing if I have the live stream schedule, I know that's every Thursday, but, okay, that means the email should go out, like, Tuesday so people know or maybe Wednesday. Right? That means, like, the following blog post after the live stream recapping what I did is gonna come out on Monday. Should that be the long form newsletter? It's so that I think that's really why I like a tool like Notion or Airtable. Airtable's super nice because, like, they give you the calendar, like, the iCal calendar, which is cool. I don't think Notion gives you they have like Notion calendar now. So like if you wanna use their calendar app, you can get it. But like, yeah. I used to have my whole production schedule in Fantastical thanks to Airtable, which was nice.
Okay. So my last question here, right, is we haven't really talked about all of this content in the service of something, but, presumably, you're building content to try to sell a service or product. Right? How do we approach that? Do we work in specific, like, sales y kind of posting to our content calendar? Do we kinda, like, slightly mention it in all of our content? What's your general recommendation for that?
Kaitlyn Merola: It's always good to kind of map out or at least have a good understanding of your buyer journey when somebody's first getting to know you and they're in the awareness stage, and then they move to the consideration stage, and then they move to the decision stage, where the content you're creating fits into that and what the purpose of each piece of content is in facilitating that buyer journey.
So a lot of the stuff that we do is very top of funnel. It's very awareness driven, really just getting that brand in front of people that it makes sense for on LinkedIn and through paid ads, Google, etcetera. That's kind of a good way to think about it. Salesy type language, like, really hard hitting sort of, like, content around.
We're working right now for a client on a competitive sort of landscape piece where it's, like, them and how they stack up against all of their top competitors, that's a decision piece. Like, that's something where they already know you. They already maybe are considering purchasing something that looks like you or your product.
This is a good piece to provide to the sales team to share as opposed to working that into the top of funnel content because that can be a little, it's challenging to do in a thoughtful way, and, b, you might lose people who are like, oh, they're just trying to sell me something. Like, everything I read from this brand, they're just trying to sell me something. They're not actually producing content to help me achieve my goal, which is what top of funnel content is really meant for.
Joe Casabona: How valuable are those? Because, like, every brand has those. Right? SavvyCal versus Calendly versus Notion versus what not Notion, but whatever. Right? I assume that content performs extremely well.
Kaitlyn Merola: It does when it's shared in the right way to the right people. I think that's where it really shines is if you have a really good system in place, you're using a marketing automation tool, and you understand your segments, and you have really clear groups of like minded buyers in your database and you're sending only to those that have been engaging with your brand for at least 6 months, they've been to your site 5 times in the last 30 days, those are the people you wanna send that to because they're already considering you. They already know you.
Joe Casabona: Gotcha. And I should say, like, this used to be the case. I don't know if it's true anymore. But if you Google SavvyCal versus Calendly, I was like number, yep, I'm still the 2nd entry on Google for that one. Only behind SavvyCal. I definitely need to update that post because it's been a while. But super valuable content. Right? I'm not gonna do, like, me versus other coaches because that just seems like
Kaitlyn Merola: Yeah. That's a little…
Joe Casabona: mean. Right? That's mean. I love that. And then, like, map the content to the buyer journey, know the buyer journey. I think this is really important. Right? Like, you don't wanna push your thing. Like, they're not even problem-aware.
Kaitlyn Merola: Exactly.
Joe Casabona: Love that. Kaitlyn, this has been such a great conversation. Again, a little bit how the sausage gets made. I told Kaitlyn, like, we probably wouldn't take the whole time, and here we are taking almost the whole time. But if people want to learn more about you, where can they find you?
Kaitlyn Merola: Yep. So you can go to [move-mktg.com]. That's our website. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can email me.
Joe Casabona: This will all be in the description in the podcast app they're listening to, and it'll all be over at [streamlined.fm/421].
And for those listening who don't wanna be bothered with show notes, it's [move-mktg.com], which I think you said as I was thinking about the show notes.
So, Kaitlyn, thanks so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.
Kaitlyn Merola: Of course. Yeah. Happy to be here.
Joe Casabona: Thank you for listening. Thanks to our sponsors.
If you wanna hear, Kaitlyn and I talk about using or not using AI for repurposing, you can become a member. Again, all of that's gonna be at [streamlined.fm/421].
But, thanks so much for listening. Until next time, I'll see you out there.