Simplify Your Marketing System with Process Mapping and Task Templates

Over the years, I've talked with lots of folks who have either wanted to start creating content for their business, their team, themselves, and people who talk about creating content, they want to do it, but they're so overwhelmed they don't know how to start. And I've been in both of those camps. I'm currently in the latter, but I was in the former. And as I've talked with more and more people in both of these positions, I've come to find out one of the biggest differences between how these people view work is what you see on the screen right here. This is how the people who do not create content view content creation. It is this giant pile of to do's, shoulds, musts. It's Gary Vee telling you to create 52 pieces of content a week and then somebody else telling you to create a hundred pieces of content a week. And you sitting there with your eyes kind of pulling out of your head wondering when am I ever gonna have the time for this? But I want to contrast this real quick with how the folks I see who create content actually view things this create one thing. The difference between these two views is everything. And it's what I want to talk about in this video as to how we can simplify our approach to marketing. Content creation or content marketing. What we're going to talk about today is how to use process mapping to give us clarity on what we need to focus on at any given time. And we're going to operate off of the assumption that, that a task is not the same as a system and why systems are actually what you're looking for if you're looking to get to this sense of calm. But before we get into all that, just to introduce myself here, if we haven't met before, hello, my name is Layla. I'm the process consultant and the creator, if you might have gathered that here at ProcessDriven. And I help teams systemize their operations and really hopefully feel less overwhelmed about the day to day work they need to do. The aim being that you can systemize, scale, delegate, do what you need to do to make work enjoyable and, and sustainable for today and the future. But first things first, let's get started on this specific scenario. And we're gonna be going through seven steps of how we can actually make ourselves feel a little bit calmer around marketing by simplifying things into a system. The first step of this journey is what I'm calling fixed or fluid. This isn't so much an actual action you need to do as just a decision you need to make the difference between fixed and fluid are two different ways of approaching our marketing simplification. If you're if you are someone that prefers a fixed approach, seeing what's coming up, knowing that you're always working towards zeroing out your list, then the fixed approach is where you're going to want to go. And that's going to guide you through how to execute things in the later steps of this video. If, however, you're someone who does not like to commit to the future, you want to make sure you're living in the moment, doing with what feels good in that period of time you'd rather not plan ahead and not know what's coming, then the fluid approach might be something that's more up your alley. If you're not sure between fixed or fluid, or maybe you've just never created before so you're not sure what your preference is, is I would encourage you to start off with the fixed approach. This is for everyone, not just certain brain types. I would say that fixed approach, generally speaking, works best at scale, and it can actually lend to feeling a little bit more in control than the fluid approach, where there's this constant pressure to create. Now remember your choice here. Write it down if you need to. We'll be revisiting it at the end of this video, but now we're going to move on to step two, which is define your deliverables. The way I'd suggest doing this is taking a piece of paper or maybe a virtual whiteboard and just adding sticky notes for the thing as you want to create regularly. And for this initial pass, I would encourage you to be as. Let's just say pessimistic as possible. Assume that you are going to be crazy busy and have no time. Given that what is the absolute minimum you must create in your ideal content creation flow? For most people, that's going to look like one primary piece of content, or maybe one secondary piece of content. That could be one blog post, or maybe it could be one blog post and one social media post. Or maybe it's just one newsletter. Here are my two if I was crazy busy and I couldn't do anything else, these are the two things I would be doing every single week or every single month to make sure I was still accomplishing my creation goals. One YouTube video and one email talking about that video. Nothing else. Everything else would be nice to have. I'm sure Gary Vee would be happier if I did those things, but I am a human being with too many other things on my plate and too many cars outside making noise. So I'm going to only have time for these two. Create whatever your preferred deliverables list are and add them to your piece of paper now. Good. I can't tell. I can't hear you. So we're just going to assume you're good and we're going to move on to step three for the next step. What we're going to do is take the deliverables that we identified here and start to turn them into a very basic process map. Process map is basically just a flowchart of what we're going to be doing and when. And since you already have your deliverables lined up here, I've even added a few more to my example here just for the sake of adding a little bit more interest visually. What we're going to do is take what you've already written and put them in an order. If you have these already on a virtual whiteboard, you could just click and drag them and put them into the correct order. So what do you want to have happen when, in this case, I'm going to have. I want to have my YouTube video, I want to have my TikTok videos from that video. Then I'll do an email newsletter for all of it and then an Instagram post afterwards. This is going to be my kind of preferred order for creating each of these deliverables five steps in a row. If I had just two steps in this process, my flow would be a lot simpler where it's just the two steps here. Whatever you have as your preferred deliverables, put them in an order here on a per video basis. So if you made one video and you wanted to be one newsletter, put those two pieces side by side. For now, I'm going to stick with my five steps here. Eventually, what we want to do is add more detail to this chart here. Right now we've got the deliverables, but if we really want to make this into a process map, we want to define how exactly we achieve each of those deliverables. To do that, we're going to want to break this chart down one layer further. So rather than just saying our video becomes a newsletter, let's actually break down what these boxes mean and break out each step in that process. So for this specific example, maybe it's script, video, record video, edit video, upload video, and that altogether, those sub steps are what make up our YouTube video process here. Then the newsletter. How do we do those steps? Well, maybe the newsletter is drafting the newsletter Proof newsletter and then schedule newsletter. Those are our three steps for that. And these three steps together make up our email deliverable here. So at the very top, what we've done is we've broken out the main deliverables, the main pieces of content, the units that we're going to create. Below them, we broke out how we're actually going to do it. And these are the pieces that become our actual tasks that we're going to focus on in order to achieve that absolute focus we talked about before. This kind of thing here where we just see one thing at a time, that task piece is really important because now if we understand that creating these two pieces requires us to do seven different things, we can focus on just one of these things at a time. So for example, when we're on scripting, we'll focus on scripting. When we're done with that, we'll focus on that, we'll focus on that. We'll focus on that one step at a time, which is what gives us that sense of focus and why content creation becomes more of a linear flow and, and not a scatter plot where everything seems just as important. As we start to expand this further, which is not something you have to do right now, but just something to keep in mind, you can start expanding this to document each area of your marketing system and simplify those too. So, for example, our blog publishing process, our blog writing process, our blog repurposing process, our social media posting process, these little steps over here feed into our overall processes, which then feed into our overall systems, which then feed into our overall business function, which, yes, is also called a system. It all kind of Russian dolls up and allows us to break things down into tiny, tiny pieces. So while most people might think of a marketing system as this, the way we get it to feel more like this is to put things into a sequence such as you see here, so you can look at one step at a time and just focus on that one step and understand how it connects to the big picture. But anyway, I digress. Once we've defined what this process is, we can start actually using this to manage our work and give us that sense of focus. The way this usually works would be to create some kind of template inside your task management tool. Actually, in the description of this video, I'll include links to some examples of what these templates might look like inside of different software. If you're using a software like SmartSuite, this might mean populating the default values in your content creation area so that you always have the checklist of these steps ready anytime you create a new piece of content. If you're using a task management software like ClickUp or Trello or Asana, you might be creating a template either as a task or list or something in between, and making sure you're either manually or automatically applying it to new content you're creating. So here I've got my blog template, write proof, upload, and then I can save this as a template inside my account. Or if you want to just keep things simple, maybe you have a Word document or a spreadsheet where you're tracking your tasks in, and then you can use the checklist function or maybe just a cell in a spreadsheet to track the steps you have in that process and just create a new document or maybe just a new repeating section each time you have that task come up. Once you have this template in whatever form set up, you're going to want to adjust this based on whether you chose fixed or fluid in the first step of this video. For example, if we want to write 12 blogs in one year and we chose the fixed approach, we're going to want to create the tasks for all 12 of those blogs for right now so that we have a fixed volume and then we're just chipping away at it. So we keep going until we get to blog number 12 and move on. The same thing would apply in ClickUp or smartsuite or any of these other tools. Make sure you have all 12 of your blogs or all 50 of your Instagram posts written out and available as pre written blocks. If you want to have the fixed approach. This means we'll have this list fixed. Yes, we'll add to it every year, or every six months, or however long you plan, but we won't have to add more in the future. Our whole job after this period will be to focus on the doing portion of this creation. Now that's for the fixed folks. Folks who prefer a more fluid, flowy approach to content creation do not need to do that. Instead, what you're going to want to do is just to build a personal habit from memory, really to create new blogs as you decide you want to write them. So for you, you would not be creating all of these blogs right now. You might instead create an automation that says every time a task is applied, apply your blog writing template. If you're in ClickUp or if you're in a Word document, it might just be every time you have a blog, you're going to manually remember to duplicate this. But basically for the fluid folks, your page is going to be entirely blank. Nothing's going to be on here, but the moment you decide that you want to write a blog, you're going to paste that template on there and start writing your blog. You would repeat this both planning and doing every time you decide to write something. The fact that both planning and doing are so close together makes the fluid flow flow a little bit more difficult for folks to adhere to and tends to cause a little bit more guilt and stress than the fixed approach. For that reason, now you might be wondering, Layla, if I'm in a Google Doc or in any software where there's not a great templating feature, how exactly could I get this template ready to go every time I want to write a blog post or whatever your deliverable is? Well, that brings us to the sponsor of today's Video Now I'm going to interrupt our regularly scheduled programming here for a quick productivity tip for from our sponsor today. Textexpander textexpander, if you do not know, is a piece of software that you can download that allows you to save snippets, basically templated stuff. And when you type a few keys on your keyboard it will populate and replace those keystrokes with a long form, whatever that you have saved. Does it make sense? Let me show you. For example, here I am inside of the textexpander software and inside here I have pre installed some of the pre made snippet libraries that's textexpander allows us to have. One of those is a social media post outline, which is a particularly cool one in my view where I can go into any of these categories and have pre filled structures for how to write social media posts, e.g. blog post sharing on social media, I've got this structure here, it comes with this little snippet. So if I open up say something on my web browser or even just a simple notepad, I'll just type SOC bp remember that? Press space and all of a sudden this magical dialog pops up. I can keep it with the default text that's here or I can write something cool like like that and then I can fill in the remaining blanks. Once I have all this filled in in the pop up dialog I can click OK and it replaces all of this stuff into formatted text. And that's just one way that textexpander can boost your productivity whenever you are typing, whether online or online offline. So if you are someone that uses your hands to use a keyboard at any point in your life. You might want to check out textexpander. It is a huge time saver and the link is in the description below. With that, back to the video. All right, now once we have this focus, we've got a linear progression, we've got a map of what we need to create either fluidly or in a fixed scope. It's time for us to start doing what we do even better. So how exactly do we do that? Well, there are some common ways we can go about it. One of my favorites is to go back to the earliest step we had where we outlined our deliverables and figure out a way to do what you're already doing in a more thoughtful or value filled way. For example, if you're already scripting, recording, editing videos and uploading, maybe we want to change how we edit to add more engaging features into our video. Or for example, if we already have these three steps for creating our newsletter, maybe we can make this drafting step a little bit less time consuming by having a generic newsletter template already inside our email tool. If you're already feeling good about your steps, look at how you can delegate portions of this budget. Allowing is there a way you can have a robot or a human being help you with a step, for example, editing the video? Could you outsource that to an editor? Find ways to actually get this off of our plate so it's not all on us. It's also leaning on other people or robots or software. Your final step here would be to go and look at ways to leverage what you're already doing and stretch it further. This is one that you would want to proceed with caution on to avoid not getting overwhelmed. But if you currently create a YouTube video in a new newsletter like I do in my example here, maybe this is the point in time where you want to consider adding maybe some short form content, maybe a social media post as well. Maybe two emails instead of one email. More is not necessarily more, but when it comes to content repurposing, sometimes it is. And so if you're at a phase where you've been very conservative and restrictive and you've tried to make yourself have a achievable goal for your content creation and you are crushing it. You're a fit, efficient, you're delegating, then maybe your final stage here might be to add more on to make you get more and more juice out of your content. Lemon squeeze? I don't know. You know what I mean? That could be your final step here. For more examples about what this might look like and ways to systemize your operations around marketing and really get your marketing simplified. Check out the links I'll have in the description. Or maybe up here where we have an example of using a social media process in a flow, fluid flow like we talked about here, and the example of a YouTube production process in a more fixed flow and what that might look like in some example software. Both of those should be found somewhere around here, but otherwise, thanks so much for watching. I hope this was helpful. Drop your questions in the comments if you have any question like and subscribe if you haven't already. Obligatory disclaimer is here. Thanks so much to our sponsor. Thank you for watching and until next time, enjoy the process. Ooh, and a quick reminder, if you want to check out textexpander for yourself, check out the description below where we have the link to sign up.