Content Creation is something that requires more than creativity and skills in photography or graphic design, copywriting, etc. While having the “right” visual assets is still important for engaging and resonating with your target audience, it is something that is best served with strategic planning. Brainstorming digital marketing content involves first starting with a strategy. That strategy should be based on business goals so that you can aim for the right – and the best – results.
But where do you begin?
We’re going to share our secrets!
But it’s not so much a secret as it is an approach. Since every business differs, we’re going to walk you through an example business and detail their thought process, considerations, and how that translated into a strategic plan that is used across the board. This guide will be especially helpful to those who find there is never an emerging trend to their sales, but want to grow it regardless; as this is the story of the business we’re focusing on.
What Are Your Business Goals?
If you aren’t already in the mind frame of planning your sales goals ahead of time, this would be the first step. For the benefit of your business, you should prepare to be the type of business owner who sets specific sales targets for each quarter. This goes beyond ‘aim to make $XXXX’ by specifying what it is that you’re going to promote and how you’re going to promote it.
This is an important first step because your content creation methods should begin with the services/products you are trying to promote at any given time.
Let’s introduce the example business and what their struggle was to arrive at this consideration…
In this blog post, we’re focusing on a Life Coach who has been running a successful business for more than 8 years and provides all their services online via paid courses that include remote 1-on-1 sessions.
This Coach simplified their offerings to break their programs and courses down by specific life journeys and challenges. This made it easy enough for prospective clients to navigate which offering was best suited for them when it came time to transact. However, the challenge that this business owner ran into was the inability to stick to promoting one offer at a time because responses were consistently good no matter what was presented.
This stemmed from a realization that there were no “bad” times to promote any one of their courses. In fact, sales were steady across the board for all courses.
But this business owner wanted more. They wanted to increase their revenue and growth to get to the next level. So now we begin going back to the board on what the sales goals should be.
For your own purposes, it’s good to decide if there is a higher ticket item (service or product category) to focus on each quarter. But if you feel you need to define this further – especially if you resonate with the challenge this Life Coach has – then select one specific offer to focus on each month.
Creating The Marketing Plan
Since we know buying decisions often require convincing people of the benefits and hint at the fear of missing out, we begin by creating a digital marketing strategy that involves all of it. By taking the time to deliver a longer run of content focused on one thing at a time, you build up expectations while laying out the pathway to sales conversions.
The details of this require a lot more in-depth explanation, so let’s begin with how this looked for the Life Coach…
The Coach noticed that they were able to garner a lot of interest when they presented their talks on YouTube, but the followers were staying on that platform. So, for starters, they began adding a CTA to join their mailing list at the end of their videos.
Every month, they began putting on a free workshop that worked as a beginner’s segway into a specific course. This also became the offer that was mentioned in YouTube videos and then became the monthly topic for social posts. An email went out to the subscriber list every month to promote these workshops. Each workshop was quickly followed up with a limited-time discount offer for said course.
One lesson that was learned early on was that hosting a general, non-specific workshop brought forth a lot of tire-kickers. However, by starting to keep workshop topics completely aligned with specific course topics, the average sales conversion was 17%. After sticking to this method for 5 months, it was recognized that the ROI for hosting these free workshops was higher than originally anticipated. In fact, because the entire process was so streamlined, more than 25% of new clients bought more than one course within 1 month of signing up for their first workshop.
In order to “streamline” this effort though, there were a few other pieces to the puzzle that involved content creation outside of YouTube videos and email marketing, so let’s take a look at the strategy implemented for those.
SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT STRATEGY:
Have you heard of the concept called “Content Buckets” or themes? Phrasing is interchangeably used and can vary, but this refers to having a different approach to the same type of content on a weekly basis.
This is a widely agreed upon strategy because in order to be considered “active” on social media, you should be posting consistently every week – whether it’s daily or on certain weekdays (recommended minimum is 3 times per week). Further to that, no one wants to see replicated posts or content that strongly suggests sales every time. So variety is needed.
The easiest way to explain how to create variety based on just one offer, let’s look at an example…
Let’s say you want to focus on one offer every month. First, you determine a list of relevant pain points that you can advise on – this alone gives you at least 4 social posts to utilize (week 1). Then you hone in on the challenges or buying considerations, and what benefits await (this can easily stretch across week 2’s posts). Another week’s worth of posts can be made up of FAQs and/or Reviews/Testimonials. Then, during week 4, you can highlight the key selling points of your offer and provide 1-2 posts that are purely sales CTAs.
Then, you repeat the cycle for your next offer/month. Wherein a month has more than 4 weeks, you can have some fun with the extra needed posts; but try not to veer far off course so you don’t unintentionally confuse your audience.
If you’re focusing on only one service or product per quarter, then you need to broaden this out more. Brainstorm different buying-decision angles from which to focus your approach each month. Or better yet, if your list of pain points inspires an opportunity to produce an abundance of content, then make each month’s overarching theme one pain point.
But if that doesn’t make sense to you because your offer is self-explanatory (which is perfectly fine), then look at how to repurpose the content from month to month. Try a different colour scheme and different phrasing, and work in context or expertise that you only thought of after posting similar content the previous month.
The point here is to find unique ways to present your expertise and relevancy without directly selling, but then leading up to the sales presentation. This approach keeps your content “sociable” while also on brand and in alignment with your business goals. When done in a way that resonates with followers, you’ve convinced them that they need something before asking them to buy – making it easier to pitch when it’s time.
But we also know that having quality photos and videos is an important part of social content today. You will need to invest some thought and production into this. This may require the aid of an agency or hiring marketing personnel if you don’t have the time to invest in any needed courses to do it by yourself.
EMAIL MARKETING CONTENT CREATION:
Growing, and engaging with, a subscriber list takes some planning. Email Marketing is effective because it’s the best way to ensure people are engaging with your content. Think about this: Social Media posts can be easily missed, but emails are more visible and easier to locate.
And, much like social media, the fact of staying relevant and engaging is by sticking to a schedule. Emailing subscribers months after they signed up often results in a higher unsubscribe rate simply because they may not recall subscribing or might not immediately recognize you when they see your email.
There is a simple formula we propose to curb this:
1) Automate a “welcome email”. As soon as someone subscribes, they should receive an email that introduces your brand, highlights what you’ll be sending them in the future, and provides links to engage on your platforms/accounts.
2) Stick to a weekly / bi-weekly / monthly email schedule. Any of these frequencies aren’t considered “too often”, and you run the risk of losing interest if you spread emails out any further than monthly.
But to keep email content engaging, you should utilize a variety of engaging content. We all know that pushing sales in every single email leads to a decline in Open Rates. So to avoid this, create Content Buckets; similar to what you would do for Social Media.
Let’s look at what the Life Coach did for weekly emails as an example: One week was the promotion of their monthly workshop. The next week was a showcase of a recent YouTube video (to foster more views and new followers). Following that week, they sent out an inspiring speech told in the format of a short story (results-based). Then, the week after that, they sent an email highlighting the “course of the month” and a CTA to enroll.
This whole approach fostered engagement and interest before a sales pitch – which is the behind-the-scenes strategy we’re highlighting here. The key to delivering emails that are both engaging and impactful is providing something unique and valuable in each so that readers look forward to receiving your emails.
BLOG WRITING:
It’s no secret that blogging is an avenue that opens up more opportunities. In addition to providing valuable information to your audience, it can boost your online visibility if done with SEO benchmarks in mind. When you plan to utilize trending search terms that apply to your offers, you can create blog posts that drive more traffic that can potentially increase conversions.
But you can also utilize this as a source of content that can be used in all of the above initiatives. To inspire some ideas, let’s look at how the Life Coach business utilized it…
- Every Workshop video was uploaded into Otter to pull a transcript. After some proofreading and needed edits, snippets were used in future social posts.
- Blog posts were created using each video’s full transcript. But instead of a simple copy and paste into one post, sections were taken out to be used in point-specific blog articles. Additional explanations and context were added to make each post completely inclusive of the topic; thereby, creating many new talking points out of a workshop that was originally focused on one topic.
- Feedback and Questions that came up as a result of the blog posts, social posts, and the workshop were noted and used to create brand-new blog posts.
As you can see, there are a lot of ways to not only curate new content but use it across your other content initiatives. So before feeling overwhelmed about the possibility this would be more work, think about how starting with blog articles can help you create content elsewhere.
Let’s take client FAQs for example. You may well use these in a variety of social posts, but you should also use them for blog post topics. Whenever you can plan ahead for this so that the blog post is available first, it would be as simple as copying content to use in social copies. Then, by keeping social post copy brief, you can simply have a CTA to “read more” on your blog.
Need More Help Brainstorming Digital Marketing Content?
By utilizing this approach to all digital marketing, and initiating it across the board, this Life Coach business created a more seamless, integrated experience that resulted in more growth. Best yet, by uniting all efforts on one topic every month, they saved time and energy when it came to content creation. This was all achieved without any ad spend; although, this is something that’s not out of the question either.
When rounding this out with ads targeting the same offer, results are generally better. You want to make sure that when you attract a new lead for something particular, there isn’t going to be a disconnect if they navigate your site or profiles and have trouble finding what they are interested in. That’s one reason why we think sticking to a monthly topic, even if the content itself isn’t constantly the same, improves relevancy.
But if you need assistance in strategizing or want an agency to step in to get you to the next level, look no further. In addition to providing digital marketing services, Northnet Media can also do a one-time digital strategy blueprint – taking the thinking out of it and giving you a guideline for content creation.