Creating a Content Strategy
You've likely heard the term "content strategy" thrown around the internet and thought to yourself:
Yes! I want that! Wait, what is that? How do I get there?
That's exactly what we will talk about today: creating a content strategy.
But not just creating a strategy:
a strategy that doesn't leave you feeling overwhelmed
a strategy that empowers you to repurpose things you've already created
a strategy that helps you educate your audience
a strategy that builds authority
I hope you're getting excited because I certainly am! Having a strategy that helps you work towards your goals, build your audience, and, most importantly, is EASY to follow will save you time and frustration.
Think of all the hours you'll get back or the stress you'll save scrambling to post or to put together a week of posts! And before you go all Debbie Downer on me, yes, this can work for ANY business.
First things first, your target audience
A target audience is the specific group of people a business or organization is trying to reach with its marketing efforts. To define a target audience:
Identify your business goals: Your target audience will depend entirely on what you want to accomplish.
Consider demographics: You can identify potential customers by looking at characteristics such as age, gender, income, and location.
Think about interests and behaviors: Understanding the interests and behaviors of your target audience can help you create content that resonates with them.
Identify pain points: Knowing your target audience's challenges and problems can help you create content that addresses their needs and provides solutions.
Create a buyer persona: A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. It includes demographics, interests, behaviors, and pain points and can help you create targeted marketing campaigns.
Once you understand your target audience, you can create content, market to their needs and interests, and are more likely to resonate with them.
Before I dive into how to create a content strategy, I want to note that when we think about creating content, we should think about it in stages or levels.
Content Stages or Levels
Stage 1: Content Pillars
Stage 2: Cornerstone Content
Stage 3: Promotional Content
Stage 4: Timely/Current Event-Related Content
All the content we create should fit into one of these stages or levels of content. Over the years, I've noticed the tendency to overthink the content businesses use to market themselves. You DO NOT have to reinvent the wheel every month! Using these four stages or levels of content allows for flexibility and gives you structure.
Now that we understand the order of operations within content creation let's dig into how to create a strategy with the stages I laid out.
Content Pillars: These are the core subjects you discuss within your content. All of your content should relate to one of these.
Cornerstone Content: This is the meat of your smaller content pieces. We use this big piece of content to chop it up into smaller pieces to intrigue our audience's interest and get them to the main event.
Promotional Content: You likely have a service or product; this is where you bring it out to shine. These are your sales or general pain point posts directing your audience to a specific service or product.
Timely/Current Event: This is where you get to news jack, use memes, jump on trends, and so much more. This is fun but sometimes challenging to keep up with.
Now we need a birdseye view of our year.
I want you to physically print out a paper calendar for the next 12 months. Here's a 12-month calendar for 2023 you can easily print. We will use this calendar to plan our launches, freebie releases, time-sensitive topics, holidays, + important dates. We're not getting super detailed when we're mapping this out. I suggest getting a few different colored markers, pencils, highlighters, or whatever you have to map out the year. Don't forget to make a color code key on your page.
Here's what my 2023 calendar looks like so far:
As you can see, I planned things out entirely for the first six months of the year and what the end of the year COULD look like. I say could because I want to see how my first two cycles of campaigns go before committing to what I will do in the Fall. This doesn't mean I'm planning to change my strategy entirely for the Fall, but I want to be able to repurpose as much as possible. So, giving myself a slight pause mid-year to evaluate feels good to me.
However, you might also notice a pattern in my campaigns as well. This will also allow me to keep that going in the second half of the year if things are going well.
Now we plan!
This is an excellent time to open your content bank to pull content you can repurpose. For example, I plan to launch a low-ticket for a new repurposing offer in January. I can break that offer down into bite-size pieces to show my target audience the value of this offer. I could also revisit any of my blog [aka cornerstone content] posts about repurposing to break down for content. Once you've pulled the content you could repurpose, it's time to open your social scheduler or content management system to start plugging things in.
Get your content on a monthly calendar.
To start, I would pull together all the promotional points you want to hit. Meaning the first day and last day of your launches, any type of countdown you'll use, emails you'll send, Lives you'll host, and so on.
NOTE: You should use your content pillars to guide the content you create, regardless of whether you're launching or nurturing. Content pillars help you stay in your lane.
Now that you have dates on the promotional points you want to hit, you can plug in your cornerstone content pieces, time-sensitive topics, and holidays + important dates. Lastly, you'll want to leave room for trending content you can apply to your evergreen and education/info content. I say leave the room because the way our social landscape is currently running makes it hard to plan too far in advance for trends.
It's time to create ✨
Now that you have a plan, it's time to create! This could look like handing your plan off to a team member or hiring someone like me to help you bring it all to life. The benefit of working with TCG for content creation is we help you stay on track with content marketing through repurposing and strategic planning.
Want to learn more about how to work with me? Click here.
