Great Content in 6 Steps: The Secret Formula
What are your favorite pages on social media that you follow? If they are brands, have you wondered how their content is created and distributed? Did their social manager wake up today and decide to do a #TrendingTuesday post pushing out their latest t-shirts for the season because it was a Tuesday, or a #factfriday post answering common questions their clients ask them, or did they just remember that it is Father’s Day and shoot out a post quickly? Probably not. They use is a content calendar. How the content is curated and distributed varies, but we are going to share with you our secret formula for creating the best content.
A large part of what we do at Slantics Advertising is creating content calendars for our clients. In fact, 75% of what we do starts within the content calendar. Everything from blogging to email marketing to social posts and even social programmatic advertising uses a formula within the content calendar to figure out what should be pushed out and when. So what’s the formula? Well, you want to think about it in terms of sizes and steps. To get the granular level content, you want to start by thinking about your company’s objectives, which help you get to your themes.
Themes
We set themes for our clients within the first week of working with them. Generally speaking, themes don’t change. Themes are the foundation of your business.
Themes also help make sure that you are distributing your topics out equally. If you are a dentist office and you want to focus equally on pediatric dentistry, educating the public on good oral hygiene, client and staff spotlights, and community outreach but all your posts are just about whitening treatments, you can expect for the public to assume whitening treatments is where you specialize.
Here are a couple of good questions to ask yourself to help determine what your themes will be:
-Who is your target market and what would interest them?
-What type of content has received the most interaction in the past or is currently?
-What products or services are most profitable for you?
-Does seasonality play a part in your business?
-Where do you want your business to be a year from now?
Ideation
Ideation is probably my favorite part of the content curation process. It’s also where the assembly line of sorts starts for the content. When I am in the ideation process I just go through and throw out any idea that comes to my mind. You could also consider this your research phase. Before I start, I pull up the upcoming month. If there are holidays or deadlines (anything date specific) that is important to a client, I will lay those out first so that I don’t miss them.
Design
I could write a million blogs about how important this is, but I’ll save it for next time. At Slantics Advertising, we believe anything that you push out to the universe needs to be branded. Why? -Because it looks more professional.
-Because it works as an extra touchpoint for your potential clients.
-Because brand recognition builds trust.
Whether you are pushing out a social media post, an email campaign, an ad, a blog, etc., make sure the visuals are designed well and it’s branded. It will be worth it, I promise. Side note: branded content does not need to have your logo plastered on it. Your brand is your:
Color codes
Fonts
Tone & Voice
Messaging
Format
This is where you’ll consider what type of format your content will need to be in. If it is a blog then it will be longer than a social post. If it is, reuse that content! A blog can be repurposed into an email, a social post, and maybe even programmatic advertising. Recycle! Be kind to your wallet and be savvy with your resources!
Call To Action
Because there is a reason you are in business, right? You need people to do something and you need to tell them what that is. (Shameless plug- see below for our CTA) I do recommend varying these. If it’s the same CTA every time it can get old, so get creative!
Quality Assurance
Because we are human. I love Grammarly and use it daily, but we always have someone that specializes in editing look over all of our content as well.
Are you looking for someone to take your social media, blogs, and emails to the next level? Let us help! We are in trenches each and every day and know what is trending and what will work for you!