Content Creation Strategy
Hello and welcome to today’s Business Foundations for Mums Podcast. Today I want to talk to you about content creation strategy. Strategy. First of all can be a really daunting word, if you’re not from the corporate world if you’re not from working in big business. Strategy, effectively, is just another word for planning. It’s a way of making a plan. So this is about your content creation strategy or your content creation plan.
So first of all, why is it important to have a content creation strategy? It’s really really essential to have a strategy because otherwise, you’re just randomly posting on social media, or putting your content out there in various formats. But you need to know number of questions you need to know who you’re aiming your content at. You need to know how they’re going to get it, whether it’s actually going out onto platforms that they’re actually likely to be on. And it’s really important to know what the purpose of your strategy is what you want to achieve. So that’s the first thing we’re going to talk about, what do you want to achieve with your content? So first of all, you have to think about whether you are trying to grow an audience before you can put really good content out to engage your audience, you are going to need to have an audience. So, is your first priority going to be to grow an audience? So you need to think about what kind of content is going to engage people what kind of content is going to bring more people to you? What kind of content is going to be shareable and getting more people to share, and to post, and to comment, and to interact with your content to grow your audience further? So once you’ve grown your audience, then you need to think about the kind of content that is going to engage, and keep engaged, the audience that you have. And when you have them engaged with you, that is the time to start selling to them. So is your content going to be about selling? Is it going to be about engaging? Is it going to be about growing your audience. At some point you will need to be continuing to grow your audience whilst also engaging those people who’ve come to your audience recently, and also selling to those who have been with you some time and who are already engaged with your content. And you need to look at a strategy that will incorporate all of those different things.
One of the key things that you need to think about is where your audience are likely to be, certainly in terms of social media, in terms of being online. Where are you going to find them? Are they offline even Are you going to find them at networking meetings. So think about where your audience are and how you can get your content? To them. I’m currently doing a podcast, you’re listening to it. A lot of my audience are busy mums. They have short pockets of time in their day, and therefore something that they can listen to whilst they are doing another task, whilst they’re driving, whilst they’re taking the dog for a walk, whilst they’re folding the washing. Those are the times that I listen to podcasts. So think about your audience and think about how they will be able to engage with your content, think about their lifestyle and where they will be. Think about the platforms on social media that they might be on. Are they likely to be on Facebook? There’s lots of mum groups on Facebook that’s why most of my content goes on to Facebook, but there’s also a really good mum community on Instagram. It could be that LinkedIn or Twitter is where your audience is. I don’t find my audience there particularly, but I haven’t focused on either of those places because my research showed that wasn’t the primary place that I was going to find them. TikTok could be somewhere as well. That’s something that I’m exploring at the moment I’m looking at whether TikTok is a place where I can find my audience. How about Pinterest? Pinterest is something else that I’ve been looking at again recently. So explore the platforms look and see where you can find your audience, look and see where they’re hanging out where they’re engaging, and think about which platforms you actually want to be on in terms of your your social media and your content. Your content could also be a blog on your website, and if that’s the case, you need to know how you’re going to get your audience to your website. So that’s about thinking about your SEO, that’s thinking about your keywords. So is your blog, the place that you want to drive people to for your content? And if that’s the case, again, how can you promote that in the other social media platforms around you?
The next thing you need to consider with your content creation strategy, is what types of posts, what types of content work best on each of the platforms? If it’s a blog sharing platform, then obviously you need a blog. If it’s a platform like Facebook, then you need to consider whether it’s the Facebook groups that you should be engaging in. From my experience, engaging in groups gets much better engagement than engaging on your own business page. You can, in some groups, engage as a business as well so you can post on your business page and then go into the groups and reshare your content there. But think about the types of content that work. If you go onto LinkedIn, and you go onto Facebook, and you look at the kind of content on there, you’ll see that the tone is very different that the kind of content that is shared on there is very different. So have a think about which platforms your audience are on, and then adapt the tone of what you’re creating, and the type of content that you’re creating according to what works best on that platform.
Once you’ve decided where your audience are hanging out, once you’ve decided what you want to achieve with your content, then you need to start coming up with some ideas for content. You need to think about what content is going to educate your audience. What’s going to engage your audience, what’s going to interest your audience? Is it something that they will relate to, something relatable, memes can be a really good way of growing engagement. If it’s something that people find relatable, Again, as a mum, posting to mums, sometimes content about children, even though the main focus of what I do is about business, the content about children and making it relatable, and the mums struggles is something that often can engage an audience really well for me. So think about the different types of content, think about what you can do, and then separate that into categories. So for example, to use my own social media account as an example. One of the categories that we like to post about is inspiration. And one of the things I personally find really inspiring is quotes. So we have a category for quotes that are going to inspire our audience that we can share with our audience. So quotes is one of our categories, trying to come up with five different categories. Another that we like to use is a post that will engage our audience that will get mums tagging other mums, that will grow our audience, that’s something that will get people to interact. Something else that can work really well is something that will educate, offer some tips on whatever it is that you specialise in. If it’s a product that you make offer tips on how it can be used, or offer tips that will rela- your audience will relate to even if it’s not specifically about your product. So think about five different types of posts that you can put out, that will engage your audience and that will give them information that they will find valuable that they will find interesting and information that they will find shareable as well. Sometimes stuff that they find amusing if that fits with your brand as well. And once you’ve got your your categories, five or six categories is a really great way to start. Then start to think about, to start to list out things that come under those categories. So for example, I used quotes as an example there, come up with a whole load of quotes, research them if you need to, go on and find quotes that really resonate with you that really resonate with what you’re trying to achieve in your brand. And find those quotes and just list out those quotes and then equally come up with those tips. Those top tips of what people can do with your product or what people can do, who are relatable to your product. It doesn’t have to be about your product specifically.
I work with an amazing brand who sells products for babies and her products are all sewn items. They’re all beautiful sewn gifts. Absolutely fantastic. Check her out In Craft Corner. Really really lovely stuff. She does keepsake gifts, where you can make baby clothes out of your babies old clothes, doesn’t have to be babies. There can be memory gifts as well as someone’s passed away and make items out of clothing and she makes all sorts of other, you know, bibs, and all sorts of things that the babies might use, and nappies, nappy bags and things like that. But a lot of the content that she posts isn’t about the products, it’s tips for mums about babies within that age range. So it’s about engaging the audience about stuff that is relatable to them, but isn’t necessarily about what you do and keep people engaging with your content. So once you’ve got your five categories, and you’ve listed out several ideas of things that you can post in each of those categories, you then have a whole list of content, you’ve probably got a month or twos worth of content there. And that’s created within one session.
Another really good way of creating content is that if you have something that you can write a lot about, or talk a lot about, on a blog, on a podcast, a podcast can very easily be repurposed as a blog. So repurposing content using it in multi ways, using it to break down into other forms of content is great. So to give an example of what we do, we have this podcast, we use an app called otter.ai and otter, you can record into otter and oce you’ve recorded into otter, it will transcribe it for you. It does need editing and tweaking but it’s a lot quicker than typing it out as a transcription. So we then have a podcast but we also have a blog. And once we’ve got those two things there that’s two types of content. So some people prefer to read some people prefer to listen. Fantastic. We’ve already got two different people, types of people, two different learning styles who are able to engage with that content. The next thing you can do is to pull out snippets of information from that podcast. And you can create little audio tracks little miniature snippets of audio, and they can be used as video content on your social media. The other thing you can do is pull out snippets of text and repurpose those as posts on your social media. So already from one piece of content from one podcast, you are creating multiple different types of content that can be put on multiple different platforms. The other thing that you can do as well is use one piece of content that can be repurposed across different platforms. Now, although I said earlier, that different platforms, different content works and so on, to a point, that’s absolutely true. But equally in the early days when you don’t have a whole content team who are there creating content for all your different platforms. When you are busy, busy, busy trying to grow your business and build your business, and create your product, create your service, create what it is you do. You don’t have time to spend hours and hours on social media creating multiple different types of content from multiple different platforms. So in those instances, and before you figured out what works and what platforms for you, because actually what works on one platform, for one person, might not work for another.
So while you’re figuring that stuff out, you can create content that is usable across multiple platforms. I certainly do. I don’t adapt my content for different platforms very much, but there’s tweaks that happen, but not huge amounts. So the content that I post on Instagram is pretty much the same as the content that I post on Facebook. However, we ensure that we add some hashtags to the Instagram content, and we make sure there’s no links in the Instagram content as well. Whereas there might be in the Facebook content. So most, but most of it is the same the images are the same, the body of the content is the same. And actually I’ll talk in a moment about the scheduling side of it as well because actually, you can do that all in one go when you’re scheduling as well. I don’t post on LinkedIn at the moment because that’s not a place where my audience tends to hang out. They are there, but not on mass as they are on the other platforms in the same way, so, and the content type I know would be different and at the moment, I don’t have time to create different kinds of content for LinkedIn. But as I said earlier, one of the things that we are looking at at the moment is creating content for TikTok and that can also be repurposed as reels onto Facebook and Instagram as well. So that way we can repurpose content onto three different platforms. We can have it as a reel, but we can also have it on our Instagram and we can have it on our Facebook so that’s three platforms covered with one type of content, which is a really good way to do it if you are time poor. Another platform that we are learning about at the moment and exploring is Pinterest, and on Pinterest we are creating multiple different images that will all lead to the same piece of content. So for each piece of content that we have on our website, so that every podcast episode and every blog post, we have at least one but sometimes two or three different images that will go on to Pinterest that will guide people to that content. And that’s because different people might be attracted by different types of visuals and different images. So we’re exploring how to do that at the moment. That’s another way of engaging people and bringing them over to look at our content.
So once you’ve decided the content that you’re going to put out there once you have your list of different categories, once you’ve decided which platforms and what formats you’re going to put it out in, whether it’s going to be video, whether it’s going to be photos, video is definitely more engaging, but it is also more time consuming. So again, it’s about getting that balance right. Then you need to actually create it. You need to go spend some time creating, and one of the things that is super important is to batch create your content. The reason that this is really important is that once you start to get into the flow of creating your mind is in a really creative place and you can actually get through working on that content a lot quicker than if you just pop in every day and try to create something new because our brain isn’t always in that right frame of mind to do it. You might find that you have a day when you’re feeling really creative and you go you know what today is the day when I’m going to batch create my content. It might be that you’re more like me, and you like to plan your time out. So you say right, I’m going to set aside a certain day a week to create content. So when you’ve got time set aside, you know that you need to be in that frame of mind to have that creativity to do what you need to do. And creating content in bulk is so much quicker. You’re in flow. You’re in all the right platforms. You’re using all the right software that you need to create and you can go in and you can also use templates. If you have a particular visual look on your Instagram for example. You can have templates that you use, you can have brand colours there you can have all those things ready. And you can use those templates if you’re creating images for example, in Canva. You can have one image and then you can copy that and use that as a base image for another image, so that you have the same feel, the same aesthetic across all of your your content.
As I mentioned, once you have created all of your content once it’s ready to go, then you can schedule it. So a really easy way to schedule a content is to use scheduling tools. If you are using Facebook and Instagram, you can share both types of content using the content scheduler in Meta Business Suite. And it’s really really easy to use. You upload your image you upload your text. You can choose to share it to Instagram and Facebook as long as those accounts are linked. And then you tick a little toggle and that toggle will allow you to go in and edit the content for each platform. So it is a little bit different on each platform. There are multiple other scheduling tools out there. If you want to schedule just to Instagram you can use tools such as Later and Planoly, which are both really good options. They’re very similar in many ways. Lots of people prefer one and lots of people prefer the other. Try them both out, see what you prefer. There are multiple other scheduling tools where you can schedule to multiple platforms at once.
So, if you’re scheduling to LinkedIn or to Twitter, a really good tool for scheduling to both of those is a tool called Buffer. That’s the one that I tend to use when I’m scheduling on behalf of clients to either of those platforms. There are scheduling apps that will shedule to pretty much every platform out there. So explore what’s out there and how important the scheduling is to you will determine how much you’re willing to pay for those platforms. You can get many of them on a free trial, or you can get some of them if you’re just posting to one or two accounts, are free. I use Buffer for free. I think you can have up to three different platforms on their free package. And scheduling through Meta Business Suite is entirely free as well. Equally Planoly has a free plan if you’re not posting very frequently. So hopefully that has given you some ideas on a process of using a content creation strategy. Thank you for listening. We look forward to speaking to you again soon. And the next podcast will be another interview with an amazing and inspiring mum in business.