Posted: May 26, 2020
If you’ve pivoted to marketing or it’s your first marketing job, creating a content calendar can be incredibly daunting. You have to plan content weeks and months ahead of time? Where are you supposed to come up with all those ideas?
While we can’t help you create the exact content that you need to fill out your content calendar, we can provide insights that can guide you as you strategize and plan. Our five tips will help you to build a strategy with useful content for your audience while encouraging higher levels of engagement.
Create content with the end-user in mind:
Our number one tip is to always review the content that you are creating with your followers in mind. If you weren’t the person creating/posting the content, is it something that you would choose to engage with? What kind of value does the content provide?
If you’re deciding to post a graphic design or a photo of your product, you should know the purpose and the desired engagement that you want from that post. This is also where the power of Call-to-Actions or CTAs come in handy, which will talk about in a bit.
Develop content with purpose:
When you’re just starting out, getting content churning and posted on a sustainable schedule is key to gaining followers and building a community. But what about next steps after that? You want to build an authoritative voice for your product/service and provide content of value for your followers to engage with.
While funny photos and videos will get laughs and reposts, long-term you’ll want to provide content with value so that you continue to gain new followers and have those followers keep checking back for updates. Content with purpose can be advance notice of sales or special pricing deals. Informational content like ebooks, white papers, and webinars also do well if you’re selling a service. Doing Q&A’s, livestreams, and AMAs (Ask Me Anything) are great, relatively low-production affairs that make you accessible to your followers.
Specific content for different channels:
It may seem obvious when written down, but some content better serves users on specific platforms. Video content does well on YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook, while photos and videos both do well on Instagram. Twitter posts have higher engagement when the content includes photos or videos, but there are plenty of tweets that go viral with text alone. And LinkedIn video content performs well, but the highest engagement comes from content with value for the professionals in your network.
When you’re building out your content calendar strategy, determine what types of content will perform best on your channels. And while we’re talking about it, we think it’s best to focus on only a couple of channels at a time. We recommend spending time and resources on a few channels instead of being spread thin across every social media platform.
Encourage engagement:
Is your content, particularly the phrasing and tone, encouraging engagement? If you simply post some text and a photo or a video with a statement of information, you may not be seeing high levels of likes, reposts, etc.
The key is to create a Call-to-Action for people to follow. “Click here”, “Like to”, and “Repost for” are all action items that encourage your community to engage with your content. Ending with a question requesting feedback is another obvious way to solicit feedback, but it positively reinforces the call for engagement by people looking at your content. If you’re creating content for campaigns, you’ll want your CTAs to drive traffic and engagement based on those campaign goals.
Circulate content from your community:
If you’re really looking to leverage engagement while coming up easy way to get content on your calendar, look to your community. Reposting thoughts and content from your followers or evangelist customers make them feel special and encourages engagement with your accounts. For you, the marketer, that’s one less piece of content you need to create.
Not seeing content worth reposting? Create a contest or call for submissions to repost. The contest doesn’t need to have a physical or monetary prize. Followers love to be recognized and have their thoughts/work shared.
Using these tips, you should have a general idea of what content would make sense for your industry, your community, and for your brand authority. Depending on if you’re doing B2B or B2C marketing, that will also shift the tone of your content and your style of marketing tactics. However, all these tips work for both B2B and B2C marketers. Whether you’re marketing to consumers or other businesses, you can still look for content from your community, use CTAs, develop content with a purpose and your end-user in mind, while strategizing on the types of content that do well on your preferred social media networks.
Are you feeling completely overwhelmed by all this talk of content and strategy? Four Tens provides content creation services for small and mid-size businesses alike! We’ll take care of the content so that you can focus on your business.