What if we told you…
- Marketers who prioritize blogging efforts are 13x more likely to see positive ROI. (HubSpot, 2019)
- Content marketing gets three times more leads than paid search advertising. (Content Marketing Institute, 2017 – Source: Hubspot)
So if content is such a huge factor in your business’s visibility, why is it that we see people create content that is:
- Inconsistent
- Without strategy
- And blindly following trends?
If most of your time is spent on content creation, do you have systems and processes in place to gauge your conversions and optimize your time?
Let’s break it doooown! Here’s a simple process to create a successful content creation system that will help you be more efficient in your content marketing strategies and keep your team organized!
We’ll break this system down into 3 different processes, with their own tasks.
Understand your foundation
The base of anything great is… well, a foundation. The same can be applied to a content creation system! The base of your content strategy will start with three key things:
- Who –> your audience
- What –> your message
- Fierce –> your unique selling point (USP)
From those three things, we can start to create the foundation of your content marketing strategy.
PRO TIP: This strategy can be implemented online or in-person if you view branded events as a type of specialized branded content!
Audience
We’re starting with the most basic – who are you catering to? Who’s your ideal client? Who’s your audience?
This goes deeper than understanding their gender (or non-gender), their likes/dislikes, and their characteristics… a strong base for an ideal client avatar will touch on points like:
- Their dreams and goals
- What is their lifestyle
- Their emotional connection to your service or product
Message
Next, is the WHAT.
Your message. Your ‘why’. Your story. When you have a clear message, you’re more able to create content that connects directly to your community, thus increasing trust, likability, and conversions!
Each piece of content you create should touch on at least one of these 3 parts:
- Your ‘why’
- Your story
- Your mission
READ: 5 Pillars of a Powerful Message for Social Enterprises
USP
Your USP, or what we like to call… your FIERCE FACTOR creates the third pillar of a strong foundation to your content creation workflow. When you know what makes your business unique (and yourself), mixed in with understanding your audience and knowing your message – TA DA! You’ve got a foundation to create your content creation system.
What is a strong unique selling point? (Let’s just refer to this is as your fierce factor from now on)
- One that communicates your FIERCE FACTOR (what makes you stand out)
- One that connects your story and message all in one
- One with clear points where your audience feels drawn to (where they can relate)
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Planning Your Content Creation System
The next part of the process is the fun part: PLANNING! Creating content is fun, of course, but the planning and organizational process can be just as exciting! When you plan, you have more time and space for spontaneity and other moving pieces. Without a content creation plan, you’re blindly creating content and continuously playing “catch up”.
For this next part, we highly recommend having an editorial calendar or “content calendar” to work with. This is where you can keep all your plans in one space to refer back to and share with your team!
Manageable Marketing
What’s the difference between a manageable marketing plan and an average marketing plan?
A manageable marketing plan looks like this:
- You take into account your team’s capacity to produce high-quality work and content
- QUALITY > QUANTITY
- Your marketing strategies are not driven by trends or FOMO
And a not so manageable one is like this:
- Driven by FOMO and shiny object syndrome
- Trends rule the type of content you produce
- QUANTITY is more important than QUALITY
- Scarcity mindset controls your promotions and offers
A manageable marketing plan is one that feels GOOD to implement and doesn’t stress you or your team out, isn’t overwhelming, and is not driven by a scarcity mindset. This is where holistic marketing strategies come into practice and feel so much more natural to you and your audience!
Editorial Calendar
After deciding what your manageable marketing strategy will look like, the next step is to plug it all into your editorial calendar (or as some like to call, a content calendar). If you have a team, this is a tool you can use to have big picture and more detailed looks at what and where your content is currently, in the content creation pipeline.
An editorial calendar keeps track of key things such as:
- Your KPIs and goals
- How often you plan on posting and where you will be posting
- Content headlines and ideas
- Publish dates
- And all the marketing things
This tool allows your team to know exactly what goal they are working towards, what piece of content is being geared to which target category, and can keep track of outgoing content and it’s statistics.
Workflow
Finally, the operational side of your content creation system is the workflow. How long does it take one piece of content to be created? What are the steps that need to happen for each piece of content to be published? Is there a checklist that you follow, that your team can replicate and create templates from?
All of this adds to the workflow process and can either be streamlined and automated for more efficiency or a hot mess… causing your content creation process to be extremely slow and jumbled.
Batch & Schedule
Want to save time, money, and effort in your content creation process? Repeat after us:
BATCH.
SCHEDULE.
AUTOMATE.
Let’s say that one more time… BATCH, SCHEDULE, AUTOMATE. When you batch your tasks, you save time. When you schedule your posts, you save time. When you automate your marketing tasks and systems, what happens… you save time!
Batch, schedule, and automate as much as you can from your content strategy, so your team has time to do what’s most important… OUTREACH!
Repurpose
The last step of a content creation workflow process is REPURPOSING.
All great content creators, content marketers, and companies utilize this tactic to get the most out of their content. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel every single time, what you need is to repurpose the wheel into different shapes, colors, sizes, and posts!
66% of marketers surveyed used blogs in their social media content. (Social Media Examiner, 2019 – Source: Hubspot)
Taking a great piece of content that performed well and repurposing it into various pieces of content on other platforms keeps your workflow running easily and efficiently. You don’t need to do EVERYTHING, you only need to do what works and do it well.
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Too Long, Didn’t Read?
Was this post too much information? Looking for all the dirty details quickly? We gotchu!
A successful content creation system is comprised of:
- 3 different processes
- Foundation
- Planning
- Workflow
Each of those three processes can be broken down into:
- Foundation
- Audience
- Message
- Fierce Factor
- Planning
- Manageable Content
- Editorial Calendar
- Workflow
- Batch & Schedule
- Repurposing
Conclusion
If you’re struggling with staying consistent and having a plan for your content marketing strategy – it could mean you are lacking:
- Structure
- Organization
- And a system
To keep you and your team on track. We know planning and organizing content and data isn’t the most fun aspect of your business, especially if that’s not your zone of genius! When you have a clear structure to follow for content creation, it makes it so much easier to create and find spontaneity to test out new strategies or ideas!
*Want to work with us on your content marketing strategy? Schedule a call to talk about how we can streamline your processes together!
Enjoyed this post? You might like these, too:
5 Tools to Upgrade your Content Marketing Strategy
How to Plan your Content Marketing Strategy for More Visibility
How to Prepare your Content Marketing Strategy for the New Year
4 Steps to Plan a Marketing Strategy
Want more help with your content? Grab your FREE Content Generating Machine here!
