The editorial plan of the optical practice: how to build it in one hour a month

It is not the number of posts that makes an optical practice’s marketing. It is the consistency with which, month after month, the people in your area receive the same four ideas about you, said in your voice, at the moments when they are looking for them. The editorial plan serves this purpose: not to fill a calendar, but to decide in advance what to say and, above all, what not to say.

I see it in many practices: they publish when there is time, that is, when there is no work, that is, in the wrong periods. They publish what arrives, that is, the supplier’s images. They publish to feel present, not to be remembered. The result is a profile that looks like all the others, as I wrote in Social media 2026: the voice comes before the channel. The editorial plan is the way out of it with one hour a month.

Before the plan: the four things you want people to remember

An editorial plan without a positioning is a list of posts. Before opening the calendar, the owner writes on a sheet the four things they want people in their area to know about their practice. Not ten: four. For example: what it does better than others (the specialisation), who it works for (the customer it prefers), how it works (the way it welcomes, examines, advises), who it is (the people on the team). Every piece of content of the month will have to belong to one of these four strands. If it belongs to none, it is not published, even if it is beautiful.

The monthly grid

The plan is built once a month, in one hour, with the grid below. The columns are the four strands; the rows are the weeks. Each cell contains an idea, one line, not the text of the post.

Week	Specialisation	Who it is for	How we work	Who we are
1	A solved case (no names): the problem, the solution
2		The person for whom this month is the right moment (for example whoever goes back to working at a computer)
3			One stage of the way we work, told (the eye test, the choice, the collection)
4				One person on the team and one thing they know how to do

Four pieces of content a month, one per strand, one a week. Whoever wants to do more adds a second row per week, not a fifth strand. The grid applies to all channels: the same content, in the same week, becomes a post on Instagram, a post on Facebook for the local audience and, once a month, the subject of the newsletter or of the message to customers. Three channels, not six. Those that cannot be kept up consistently are not opened.

The four rules that make the plan sustainable

Seasons before ideas. The month is planned by looking at what happens to people, not to the practice: back to school, the changing light, sport, holidays, check-ups. The "who it is for" strand fills up almost by itself when you start from the season.

The images are yours. The supplier’s photos tell the supplier’s story. A photo taken with a phone inside the practice, with real people, tells yours. You do not need to be good: you need to be recognisable. The principle is the same as in The product is content too.

One voice. Whoever writes may change, the voice does not. You decide once how the practice speaks (formal or informal, with which words, without which ones) and you write it on a sheet next to the grid. It is the part practices skip, and it is the part that makes them recognisable.

The rule of no. Every month requests arrive: the supplier’s promotion, the buying group’s initiative, the content "everyone is doing". The rule is one: if it does not fit one of the four strands, it is not published. The plan is not a to-do list, it is a filter.

The hour a month, minute by minute

The first ten minutes you look at last month’s numbers: which content brought a question, a visit, a phone call. Not the "likes": the questions. Twenty minutes you fill in next month’s grid, starting from the season. Fifteen minutes you decide who does what: who takes the photos, who writes, who publishes, on which days. The last fifteen you write the titles of the four pieces of content, one line each, because content with a written title gets made; content "to think about" never does.

The editorial plan is not there to publish more. It is there so you do not have to decide every day what to say.

What to measure

The editorial plan of an optical practice is measured with three numbers, kept in the same table as management control: the new people who say they came because of a piece of content (you ask at the till, always), the enquiries that arrived through the channels (messages, phone calls, bookings) and, once every three months, the share of new customers in the total. If in six months these numbers do not move, the problem is not the plan: it is the positioning, that is, the four things written on the sheet at the beginning. You go back there, you do not change channels. No system does this work on its own, as I wrote in There is no automatic system for acquiring customers.

The four-column grid, and the way to use it in your own voice, is one of the parts of Trade Up Online, the self-guided programme available from 15 November in Italy; outside Italy, The Charismatic Practice. The other articles are in the digital marketing for optics area; for the wider picture, optical retail marketing.