Digital Content Strategy for Social Media & Beyond
I want to talk to you about content planning and share some social media tips + tricks. I will first walk you through some content planning best practices by talking through the content planning workbook I use with my clients.
Grab the simplified version below:
Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5aejvk0qq9y7fqx/Content%20workbook%20-%20MBF%20Membership.pdf?dl=0
Go ahead and open up the workbook and follow along if you so choose or bookmark this blog post and schedule time on your calendar to work through these pages. You'll see this on the second page when you open the workbook.
I want to highlight how we can break down content to stretch it out further, giving us more to share on social media. The example shown is for my business. So, one of my content pillars is creating content.
Some subtopics for creating content could be:
Content repurposing
Add value content
Sales/engagement content
Where to find ideas
How to create
Trends
Then those subtopics can break down into:
Content repurposing
What to repurpose
How to do it
How often
Add value content
What does this mean?
How to create
Creating with your offers in mind
Sales/engagement content
How to sell via content
What type of content to post
Supporting sales content
As you can see, working with content pillars allows us to fill our content calendar strategically.
Let's back up for a moment...
Content Pillars organize principles or themes for all content in all channels and form the foundation of your overall content strategy. These pillars reflect your thought leadership stand and possibly elements of your model if you’ve created one. They should also incorporate what your business stands for and brings to the market.
Through content pillars, you can plan and create informed and relevant content for your target audience and build consistent content in a scalable way. Over time, these pillars can help you to establish a strong positioning in the industry and build trust and authority with prospective and existing customers.
Content Topics are the sub-ideas that come from your content pillars. These are the yellow boxes from page two. There are likely more than three content topics under each pillar; I just wanted to give you a starting idea.
Some examples of content topics you could explore within your content pillars could look like this:
Educational content
Establish authority
Brand story
Deep dives
How to / hacks
Informative content
Portfolio work
Talk about your process
Social proof
News
Entertaining content
UGC
opinion
Meeting customers at every stage of their buying journey through content
Customer service content
FAQs
Housekeeping
BTS
These content topics are suggestions, but rotating through some versions of these is a good idea to keep your content informative, educational, entertaining, and to sell.
So, using my business again as an example, my content pillars might look like this:
Creating Content
Education
Entertainment
Promotional
News
Marketing
Education
Entertainment
Promotional
News
Social media
Education
Entertainment
Promotional
News
Business Owner life
Education
Entertainment
Promotional
News
Which then turns into something like this:
Creating content:
Education
What is cornerstone content?
How-to xyz
Entertainment
Meme reels hitting ideal client pain points
Trendy reels
Social trends
Promotional
Freebies
features/benefits
Cart open
News
Platform updates
General newsjacking
Now I can drill that down even further to come up with the TYPES of content I want to create:
Education
What is cornerstone content? - BLOG
How-to xyz - VIDEO
Entertainment
Meme reels hitting ideal client pain points - REEL
Trendy reels - REEL
Social trends - CAROUSEL POST
Promotional
Freebies - STATIC POST
Features/benefits - CAROUSEL POST
Cart open - STATIC POST
News
Platform updates - CAROUSEL POST
General newsjacking - STATIC POST
Let’s just briefly pause here to note that we aren’t committing to ANYTHING yet. We’re just brainstorming.
Let’s find your content!
Are you already creating cornerstone content? Let's clear up some quick definitions first...
Content is how your brand shows up online.
Cornerstone content is high-quality content you can center your marketing efforts around.
A content strategy is thinking strategically about how your brand shows up online.
You may already be creating cornerstone content, but you may not leverage it enough to fill your content calendar.
Do you have:
A podcast
A blog
A course
A membership
Do you go live
Are you creating video content
If you said yes to any of these, you, my friend, you’re already creating cornerstone content!
Now, I want to note that we should always focus our efforts on quality vs. quantity. It can seem like a race for new content with ever-changing features and content types on social media and content marketing. However, creating 1-2 QUALITY cornerstone content pieces a month that you can theme your content around enables you to stack your posts, creating more trust and authority within your niche.
Content goals
We're moving onto page four of the workbook to dig into your content goals.
How much time do you *actually* have? If we go into our marketing efforts without first acknowledging how much time we truly have to commit or CAN commit, we set ourselves up for greater success. We do this by setting realistic expectations from the start. It’s okay to start small, but the important thing here is consistency; if posting only 2 days a week, what feels most manageable for you? Okay, that is fine, but those two posts must be consistent and juicy.
Again, YOU GET TO DECIDE what your content goals are. What does this look like? Map it out:
how many emails do you want to send each month?
How many cornerstone content pieces do you have time to create each month?
What are your business goals for any given month?
What things should you discuss within your content to aim your content AT your business goals?
This leads us right into our YEARLY Promotional Calendar
Your promotional calendar should include things like:
When are you launching
What time are you taking off
What holidays will your business celebrate and so on…
Now, we want to get a birdseye view of our year. it’s just about the middle of the year, and you’ve likely thought about your goals for 2022. Now it’s time to market your business and make it happen.
If you wanted to break this down further, you could do the same thing by quarter.
Now that you know how much time we have to commit to content and have an overview of our year. With this all in front of you, it's time to brainstorm some cornerstone content ideas and plug them into our calendar.
Workflows
On 5 page of the workbook is a page with two sections where you can brainstorm cornerstone content based on your yearly calendar and think about your content workflow. This page is meant to be messy, so don’t worry if your brainstorm box is filled in so that only you understand it.
You’ll use your workflow every time you create a new piece of cornerstone content. So, If you write blog posts, your workflow might look something like this:
Blog post idea
Outline
Write
Full blog post
Meta description
Engagement caption(s)
Create images
Header
IG square
IG story slide(s)
Publish
Add to newsletter
Plan social posts to align with a newsletter
Your workflow may evolve and change over time but overall this is the process you’ll follow every time you create cornerstone content. By giving ourselves a rinse and repeat process, we remove the drama surrounding our content creation.
