Marketing Meal Prep: Turn Your Content Menu Into a Year-long Feast

Planning ahead and buying in bulk are two things that meal planning and you, an association looking to maximize your content marketing strategy, have in common.

Okay, so not everyone’s a suburban soccer parent buying a month’s worth of frozen veggies, chicken, and whatever cereal your child has decided to like this week (apparently Cap’n Crunch is always a good choice — I go for Rice Krispies like a boring adult).

But the concept of meal planning and shopping for groceries is the same as making an awesome content marketing strategy. Check it out.

Step 1: plan your menu

What, you think the Barefoot Contessa magically has ingredients just laying around? No, she plans it and makes a grocery list then sends Jeffrey to pick it up. The first step to excellent meal planning starts with developing your menu. 

How many times are you doing tacos this month? How much meat and cheese and vegetables do you need for each of those meals? All of that goes on the list. 

Creating a high-powered content calendar for associations works the same way. Plan a selection of what you’d like to release at the beginning of the year. Say you’re an association for retail stores and you want to have 12 videos released; plan out your topics. One on grocery, two on e-commerce, two on marketing strategies – digital and traditional – and so on. Once you have your content marketing concepts planned out, you can move on to the next step.

Step 2: shop for your Ingredients

Buying in bulk is super helpful. You get more value - it may have a slightly higher upfront cost, but overall, the price-per-piece will be lower. You can also check off your entire shopping list in one trip instead of stopping at three different places for different ingredients. 

The association equivalent? Film at an event – you’ve already gone through the effort of promoting to your members, booking keynote speakers and scheduling industry experts for educational sessions. Now that everyone you could possibly want to film is in one place, it’s easier to book a 30-minute interview with each of them than it would have been to corral them all throughout the year.  

Perhaps you need some member testimonials. Or you have an expert talking about automation in your field. Maybe it’s a leadership specialist coming in for a keynote. Whatever it is, you can arrange to have them drop by and answer some questions to make into videos for members to watch throughout the year.

Step 3: feed the masses 

You have all the ingredients, now it’s time to get cooking.

The menu (content calendar) is already planned. So now you just have to execute. The good news is, you don’t even need to worry about capturing interviews for each content piece.

If you’re doing the work in-house, hand your interviews and your plan to the team writing and editing the video together. They can put everything in order, expand where needed, and get the content put together for distribution. 

If you don’t have an in-house team, then you simply hand everything off to your trusted partners. You can pop in for approvals on videos, podcasts and magazine articles (all must-haves for an association's content marketing strategy) and let them handle the rest. 

**Self-promotion incoming**

At Association TV, this is part of what we do. Just look at how happy the Material Handling Institute is with this model.

Now you know how to plan and invest ahead of your event to capture everything you need and create content all year long. If you want to chat with someone about how we can help you make these plans, book a call today.