Answer these questions when creating content.
A lot of times I meet with business owners and creators and influencers who just say I have a hard time managing how I create content for my business. And what should I be looking for? What are some tips and tricks. Sometimes it’s just so hard to think about having all these different assets and how do I take them and use them in a way that makes sense for my business. For social media and not only social media but for my marketing channel.
What types of content do I want to create?
First, look at the spread of content you already have access to. Have you done a photo or video shoot for your business? If not, start here and get your first photo and video shoot scheduled. If you have done photo or video shoots in the past, now is a good time to go back and reference this content. What can you use and repurpose for your social media channels and marketing efforts? If you haven’t already, make sure you are building a repository of content and storing in a shared drive location like on Google Drive or Dropbox and begin to sort your content. Here are some suggestions on categories to start with:
- Evergreen: Content that can be used at any time. You could post it today, a week from now, six months from now, or a year from now and it would still be relevant.
- Seasonal: Something that comes and goes and is only relevant for a specific period of time. Think holidays, themed months, etc.
- Product: Relevant for e-commerce businesses. This would include your product shots – pictures of your product on a white or colored background, in nature, etc.
- Campaign: Specific content for a product launch or company focus would be considered a campaign. Campaigns can run anywhere from several days, weeks, even months. The timing is up to you.
- Influencer: If you’ve had influencers share content on behalf of your brand, keep this in a file to easily access. If you have done paid collaborations, make a note of usage rights and when they expire (if they do).
What are my Content Pillars?
Once you do an assessment of your content, you can begin building out your content strategy. If you’ve taken one of my social media workshops or webinars before then you have definitely heard of content pillars. Your content pillars are 3-5 topics that you are going to cover regularly on your social media channels as part of your overall strategy.
Typically if you’re already in the commerce business what I usually recommend to clients is talk about the following;
- Product: Talk about the product itself.
- Lifestyle: Talk about how your product fits into someone’s lifestyle
- Testimonial: How your product has made an impact for your clients.
You take those content pillars: product, lifestyle and testimonials. Use that as building blocks to build your content calendar. Then we’re gonna look at our evergreen content and look at that evergreen content that we have in this folder. And now see what can fit into the product slot, what can fit into the lifestyle slot and what can fit into my testimonial. So maybe you start building up a bank of testimonials.
Testimonials
SO the next question that I get a lot when it comes to content creation is
I have these great testimonials from my business but I don’t know how to do anything with them.
I recommend using a tool like Canva for business. Canva is an amazing graphic design tool for marketers and graphic designers that I know love it too. It allows you to create graphics rather easily than you can in photoshop.
Create a Branding Template
Create a template in a program like Canva with your brand colors and your fonts and put your testimonial into that format. You can create graphics with the following to keep your testimonials on brand;
- Brand Font
- Branding Colors
- Logo
This way you can keep a template on hand, easily go into Canva and edit the testimonial and you’ll have cohesive branding graphics for social media and your website.
Instagram Reels
We also know that instagram is loving videos and real content. So how could you take that graphic that you made into a testimonial and turn that into a video?
- Animate the text
- Include four testimonials into one video with animation
So these are all ways that you can take content and build it into a format that you can replicate week after week after week.
The key with content creation is you want to do something that is doable for your business. You want to make sure that you have assets. It’s crucial to invest in content.
Branding Photography
Lastly, If you want to be on social media and on Instagram I highly suggest making an investment with a branding photoshoot and photography. If your personal brand has a personal brand photographer take some pictures of you to help visually demonstrate your work.
Branding Photoshoot ideas
- You with your product
- Working in the office
- You staging a phone call
- You staging with client and client relationships
Photography is important, but just as much as videos. Instagram is prioritizing Reels, you need to schedule time to get this content on your calendar.
If you are in the Los Angeles area, I have photographers and videographers. I am happy to recommend and refer to you if you are interested.
I always say to my students when I teach my marketing classes that content is the fuel to your marketing engine. If you don’t have content, even if you have fancy car, you are not going to get very far.