Content Planning Series: Part Two
Welcome back for Part Two of my four-part series on content planning and strategy. If you are just stumbling onto my blog, I highly recommend you check out Part One first and come back to this one after you’ve read that post. 😉
In this week’s installment, we’re going to cover planning and creating your content. Because once you have a strategy and you’ve identified the objectives and tactics, you need to do the work of actually creating content to reach those goals and objectives.
Q2: How do I plan and create content consistently?
The good thing is that by asking this question you’ve already identified a commitment that most aren’t realizing can make the difference between existing and flourishing…and that’s having a plan.
Last week, I talked about identifying the best platforms for ROI. This week, I’d like to go a bit further into that topic and share some resources for how to come to that decision if you’re still struggling with the idea of not doing all the things on all the platforms. In his book This Is Marketing, Seth Godin talks about focusing on your smallest viable audience—the people who can sustain you without burning yourself out. Depending on what audience you’re trying to reach, the platform you decide to spend your resources on will vary, so do your research.
Here are some recommended articles to help you get started:
Once you identify where your time is best spent, it’s important to follow up with research into what your audience behaviors currently are on those platforms by using those Insights we talked about last week. Or, if you’re brand new to the platform, or just brand new to trying to work strategically, you may want to refer to this guide from SproutSocial on the best times/days of the week to post your content for optimal impact.
If you read last week’s post and you already figured out all of those details, this week we’re going to learn how we commit to a plan of action based on the strategic goals and objectives you came up with using my free template. Let’s say the platform you decide to spend the bulk of your efforts on is Instagram, you’ll want to set a goal for the amount and types of content you want to consistently create. This may look like:
Monday: In-feed post
Wednesday: In-feed post
Friday: Instagram Live/IGTV
Monday - Friday: IG Stories (daily check-in and updates)
Sticking to a schedule allows you to set expectations for yourself and your audience. If your followers grow accustomed to an Instagram Live Happy Hour every week and you don’t stick to your commitment, you’ll turn them off by being inconsistent. Conversely, you can’t turn people off who don’t even know anything about you yet. Start building your highly engaged audience by being consistent.
The Content Planner
To address the second part of question two: How do I create consistently? we refer back to those content pillars mentioned in the Part One. If you know your content pillars/buckets, then you can use those as your guide in creating content.
To demonstrate how this works in practice, we’ll use one of my fake personas from last week’s blog. If you remember, Amira is a service provider whose niche is interior decorating. Her content pillars are: interior decor, sustainability, lifestyle, client work and testimonials.
Using the schedule mentioned above, Amira would plan to show up on IG Stories each day sharing what her day is like:
on her way to meet a client
shopping in a home decor store
sharing dupes for high-waste products, etc.
Knowing that she is about to start work on a new client’s home, she’d plan ahead and take “before” photos of the room she was hired to redecorate, so when the project was complete she could post a “Before & After” in-feed post. With her client’s permission, she might even plan to capture some time-lapse videos of the project in-progress, which could be published as an in-feed post, IGTV, or Instagram Reel. And if she were really trying to add value to her audience, she’d make a list of common pain points that clients come to her with and share some helpful tips in an in-feed text graphic post that would be highly attractive to share to IG Stories or “saved” for later reference by her followers, potential leads, and folks who may never even interact with her again but have just helped further her reach. In doing all of these things, Amira is touching on nearly every single one of her content pillars and in a variety of ways on her most valuable platform.
Remembering or thinking ahead to do these things though isn’t an easy task. This is why it’s incredibly important to remember that planning ahead is your best strategic tool. To effectively plan ahead, you can use anything from a notebook or monthly calendar to an actual content planner or digital project management tool. Personally, in my professional life, I plan completely digitally with a custom-built-by-me Excel content calendar, but for my own, personal content creation I rely on both paper and digital. I use The Content Planner (shown above) to write down all of my ideas and set a plan, and then I create task cards, checklists, and due dates in Trello to stay on track with my plans each month.
One thing to remember and give yourself grace about is that even with the best of intentions and a strong plan, you can still hit creative blocks. So two things to keep in mind as useful tools when content planning are:
Use seasonal events, holidays, random “national” holidays, current events, etc. to keep you sharp and up-to-speed with trending topics.
There are several ways to repurpose the ideas I shared for “Amira” above. Just because you use an idea in one medium or on one platform doesn’t mean it can’t be repurposed into a fresh piece of content (that text graphic could also be a blog post on her website).
Editorial note: Just please, for the love of God, don’t schedule your content onto every platform you’re on all at the same exact time! It comes off lazy and automated.
In the next part of this content planning series, I will dive into the “how” of scheduling and automating content. And I’ll share which tools I recommend to help you create high-quality content on a budget.
