How To Make Content Marketing Faster And Easier
Content in King — That phrase probably isn’t new to you if you are starting a business, getting ready to start a business, or if you’ve already started a business — you probably have already heard plenty of times. Content is an important part of your overall marketing strategy and that can be really overwhelming especially if you’re a solopreneur doing all your marketing on your own. But even if you are a business owner with a team you need to have a strategy in place so that your using your resources wisely.
CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY?
Feeling like a hamster on a wheel? You are not alone. With content marketing strategies, a lot of times, people don’t know how to manage their time and attention for it. And then they feel like they’re putting too much time and attention towards it, and not seeing results from all that time and attention that they’re spending on it. This is where inconsistent content efforts comes into play and you see a lot of stop and start posting, and then ghosting might set it and then the cycle starts again.
This is why I am all about setting up a strategy for your business that is sustainable and realistic for you. Because let’s be honest it doesn’t really matter what strategy you’re setting up, if it’s not going to be sustainable for you. If you’re not going to be able to execute your strategy. That strategy is irrelevant — who cares? You might as well not even have it.
So something that’s going to be really important as we talk through content marketing today is to think through what you can REALISTICALLY do every day, every week, every month for your content marketing strategy. I just want you to run everything through that filter because that is going to be the most helpful and impactful thing you can do when you’re planning your content marketing strategy.
There are three main areas:
- Content pillars and themes
- Repurposing your content
- Recycling your content
BRAND PILLARS & THEMES
Essentially, your first stop is brand pillars and themes. Your brand pillars are going to be the really important big ideas in your business, the core of what you are about, what you’re selling, and filling your clients’ needs. And then your themes are going to be subtopics within those pillars. So you can have three to five pillars. And within each pillar, you’re going to have different themes. So for example, my pillars would be marketing, sales, systems and processes, and strategy execution. You want to outline pillars that are broad enough topics that you’re going to be able to discuss them in different ways, time and time again. What you don’t want is to choose something to be your pillar that’s too specific.
Once you’ve identified three to five pillars, think through those themes, or more specific things. So if my pillar was systems and processes, a theme for me might be task management systems like ClickUp. Then once you have a couple of themes within each of your three to five brand pillars, you now have content topics that you can start to design your content strategy around.
The key here is that you want to touch on one theme at a time and mix them up a little bit. So you wouldn’t be talking about all three themes within your marketing pillar, all at once, or if one of my pillars was mindset, I wouldn’t want to talk about all three themes that I have within my mindset pillar one right after the other. You want enough variety there so that if a customer is getting to know you and they’re coming into the fold, they might not be as interested in the mindset piece of it. But that systems and processes piece is really speaking to them! So mix it up and diversify your content.
Content tip; once you’ve established these brand pillars and themes, when YOU are consuming content, you need to be thinking about building on that and brainstorming, “how could I make a piece of content like that but better?” And a lot of people want to make that wrong. They say they don’t want want to “copy” them. But the reality is — it’s not very often that you are truly inventing something completely new. We’re all always learning new things, taking those things in making them our own. And then bringing those into the fold. So when you’re consuming content, really just be open to having ideas around what you can make a piece of content around and keep a running list of possible content topics. This list is going to come in handy when you sit down to create your content each month because you’re going to be able to slot those possible content topics into the brand, pillar, and theme that they are associated with.
CONTENT REPURPOSING
The next piece of the puzzle is content repurposing. Content repurposing is using one core piece of content, and then repurposing that piece of content into other pieces of content for the same platform or for other platforms.
An example of that would be filming an Instagram Live and recording that and splicing it out into multiple smaller pieces for IGTV. And then that might be further splicing that out into shorter Instagram stories. That’s repurposing at its finest. So now you have way more pieces of content, but you spent a lot less time actually creating that content and recording that content! The reason that this is so great is creating content is not easy for everybody. It takes a lot of time and energy! Even if you love creating content and always feel really inspired by it, at a certain point, you’re going to hit a point where you don’t really feel like creating anything. So repurposing content is making that piece of content work harder for you, it’s making it go further. And it’s also going to allow you to get that piece of value in front of more people.
Repurposing content is also beneficial when you start to outsource. Because you can create that core piece of content, and you can have other people repurpose it into those different pieces of content. It’s still all your content, and it’s still your words. But now you have 10 pieces of content from that one, and you only spent time creating that one piece of content. This is incredibly impactful for business owners as they’re growing and as they’re scaling. Giving value and becoming known as the expert helps build that Know Like Trust Factor. It’s not sustainable to be creating content all day, every day. That’s exhausting. And most of us don’t have the time to do that. Using this repurposing strategy is going to help you to work much more efficiently!
RECYCLING CONTENT
Then there is something known as recycling content. This is similar to repurposing content — you’re making it work harder for you, you’re making the content you’ve created, go further. And you’re allowing yourself to not have to spend so much time creating content, but you’re going to get more out of it. So if you’ve already set your brand pillars and your brand themes, and you’ve got a really solid strategy around how to repurpose that content from those couple of core pieces of content that you’re creating and whether you’re doing that or your team member is doing that.
Next, think about recycling that content. This is where tracking How, When, and Where you’re posting comes in handy. I use a spreadsheet for this where we note “the podcast is talking about this this week.” So for example this blog post is all about content marketing strategy. So that’s marketing that falls in my marketing pillar. And then within that pillar, I have that content marketing theme. So we know that that’s the pillar and the theme, and this podcast episode is happening this week. It’s getting posted this week. We know when it’s being posted in that spreadsheet.
For our extra types of “one-off value add” posts, we use adifferent tab on the same spreadsheet, so we can easily pull from it and add them in. And we know which post was posted on what date. This is important because you’re going to start to work through those pillars and those themes that we talked about. If you’ve set up five pillars for your business, and there are three themes within each of those pillars, and each theme represents one week worth of content, that’s 15 weeks' worth of content right there! Easy Peesy right! You’re going to really clearly and really diligently organize all of your content and know when it’s going out with your spreadsheet.
After you work through all those themes — you’re going to go back to the beginning. And I know that this is mind-blowing for some people. But you should be recycling your content. First of all, nobody’s gonna remember what you posted 15 weeks ago, you probably don’t even remember. But also you have new audience members, you have new users who have discovered you, since you’ve posted that. And if it’s an education, value-based piece of content, and they’ve never gotten it, you can almost think of it as your duty to reshare because it’s really great information and I want them to learn this information! And that’s just a little bit of a mindset reframe that sometimes people need to make. Remember when we are learning, oftentimes we have to hear them and see them multiple times before it actually clicks. So that’s another reason why recycling content makes sense.
So many people just create, create, create, but don’t think about it as creating a content library. If you do this you are not fully leveraging your content that you spent so much time producing, creating, for very few to see it. If you’re spending all of that time on that content, you want to make sure the most people possible are seeing it and seeing that value and seeing that benefit and building that know like trust factor with you. So if you are not recycling your content, start now! Just remember to organize it in a way that it’s going to be easy for you to go back and see what you posted and when so you know when to use that piece of content again.
If you want to dive deeper into how I execute on all these things, check out my Content to Clients course. This course helps you figure out how to organize and repurpose all of your content!
