Develop a content plan in Airtable

- [Instructor] Now that we've determined the messaging for our marketing campaign and we've established which channels we're going to use, it's time to develop our content plan. For each item in our content plan, we need to think about certain elements and then record them so that we know who's doing what, when things will be published, and what it is actually that we're going to be doing. So, first of all, for each individual item, what's the overall theme? So this is like the title or the headline. When will it be published? What channels will it be published to, and who will create the content? Now, it makes sense to create our content plan in Airtable because we've already added our channels and our messaging in there, so we can just link everything together. Let's go ahead and take a look. Okay, so here I am in Airtable, and we already have our Channels table and our Messaging table. So let's go ahead and add a new table and call it Content. We'll just create an empty table, name it Content. And now let's go ahead and let's start configuring our elements. So first of all, we have the Name field. Let's go ahead and just call that Title. I like that a little bit better. Secondly, we need a published date, so let's go ahead and add Publish Date, and we'll go ahead and choose the date data type and click Save. Then we also need who the author's going to be. So I'll just do Author, and then we'll go and we'll choose Collaborator so we could link any collaborators to this if we wanted to, and we'll save that field. Now, we also want to link it to what channel it's going to be published on and/or what message it's going to be delivering. So I think it's better to go with messaging because we can link it to our Messaging table and then automatically bring in, if we go to the Messaging table, we can automatically bring in the channels that we'll be publishing it to. So let's take a look at how that works. So we're going to go to the Status field, and we're going to change that, or actually let's leave the Status field, we might want that, let's add a new field, and we'll call it Messaging. And now we'll choose Link to another record and we'll choose the Messaging record. We'll click on Create Field, and this is actually something we want to look at now. So do we want to add a lookup field? So it's asking us, when we look at the Messaging table, are there any fields in the Messaging table that messaging is linked to that we also want to show here in content? And there are. We want to look at the channels. So let's go ahead and choose Channels and click Add 1 Field. So now you notice that Channels is already in here. So we've got a lot of our fields configured here, and I'll show you how you could add some more optional fields at the end, but let's go ahead and let's add an item to our content plan or really kind of our content schedule. So we need to create a banner for Google Ads that advertises our free shipping. So we'll just call this Free Shipping Banner. We'll say the published date is May 18th. I'm going to be the Author, but obviously you could add somebody else if you had them in here. The Status is Todo. We haven't started it yet. So now we need to choose the messaging. So obviously we know it's the Free Shipping Banner, but this one's pretty easy because it's just our PPC banner. So the messaging and the title are the same. But when we talk about content marketing, so articles on websites, or maybe even social media posts, the title might be a little bit different from the messaging. But for this one, we'll go ahead and we'll choose our messaging, and obviously we're going to choose Free shipping. And you'll notice that, voila, it brought in the Google Ads channel for us. So we know that this content, once it's complete, is going to go on the Google Ads channel. So you could go through here and you could add all of the individual pieces of content that you want to create. Now, there's some more things you can do as well. You could add a field for, say, a graphic. For this one, we're really just creating a graphic. There's not going to be much text with this. So we could create a field and we could just call it Graphic. And then we could go down here to the field type, and we could choose, I guess we'll have to search here. We'll choose Attachment. That will be the easiest one for us. So we'll create that field. And now when we go into the Graphic field, you'll notice that you can drop files right in here. We could add an attachment. That is how you can get all of your actual content here in Airtable so that all of the collaborators on your team have access, can see where things are at, and can access the files. So you could also create another field for Ad Copy, let's say, and this could be also an Attachment field. So we could upload the documents that have all the text for our files, regardless of what program you're using, whether it's Word or something like that. You could actually upload the file right there. You can be creative with this. You could add more columns if you wanted to, if depending on the type of content you're creating. But this is a great way to schedule your content. And it's going to be in line with your Messaging and your Channels. This almost ensures that it's in line with your Messaging by doing it all at the same place here in Airtable. We're making sure that when we create a content item, we need to link that to Messaging. When we link it to Messaging, it automatically brings in our channels. So go ahead and get your table created and start adding all of your individual elements that you want to create in terms of your content as part of your marketing plan.