Like many other business owners, when I flew to Ibiza in April – I had three choices…
Do twice a much work before I left.
Do twice a much work when I return.
Lose a week’s worth of earnings.
As someone who starts to panic when they’re even one day behind schedule, you can guess that I did the first and worked my butt off to ensure that everything was ship shape before I boarded that plane. However if you’re someone who posts on Social Media in real time, writes blog posts whenever they come to you and sends emails as and when they remember… then you may find my checklist below handy!
Firstly, you need to look at when you’ll return home – and trust me, add on a day to readjust, do the washing etc. Then take into account any work you’d usually be doing on that return date. Otherwise you’re just continually pushing things back and getting into a vicious cycle. Once you’ve calculated when your next opportunity to work on your marketing is – you know how much you need to prepare in advance.
Second, sit down (preferably with a calendar in front of you) and map out your marketing from now until then. Allow time for packing, pre-holiday appointments, the work you usually do etc. If you have a marketing strategy already then this should be simple – but you can literally just use a month-to-view calendar to write in when you’d like your podcast, newsletter, blog post, social media posts etc to go out.
Next, make sure that you have scheduling tools for everything you want to automate whilst you’re gone. I use Business Suite for Instagram & Facebook, and Hootsuite for LinkedIn & Pinterest (or Twitter, if you use that). My blog posts can be scheduled as I use SquareSpace and my Newsletters can also be done in advance on FloDesk. Most Podcast platforms allow you to schedule their release. If you can’t schedule things, then you can at least draft them so that it’s one push of a button whilst you’re away – or even something you could delegate to a VA.
Unfortunately, the last thing to do is batch create. Great if that’s your thing but if not then you’ve gotta suck it up so that things don’t fall silent whilst you’re away. Personally, I’d start with a blog post (and get it scheduled in), then you can cross-pollenate content from that into your Newsletter & Social Media posts. I don’t do podcasts, but if you do then you might start there, create a transcript from it for your blog post and start the cycle there.
The ideal scenario is that you don’t fall completely silent, so don’t worry about keeping up with your usual frequency of posts but if you’ve worked hard to create consistency then trust me, it’s worth the effort to plan and schedule ahead for whilst you’re away so that at least something is going out.
In short, here’s your handy checklist to tick off.
✅ Work out how long you need to fill
✅ Plan what content is going out when
✅ Ensure your schedulers are set up to go
✅ Batch create and schedule your content
If you don’t already schedule, then I’d recommend you give everything a trial run before you go so that there are no hiccups or headaches whilst you’re on holiday. Then you can travel away, turn off your phone and know that your marketing is still going out seamlessly to create you leads for when you return!
Let me know if this was helpful, it really helped me out!
Becka