Creating content is more than just finding words to put on a page. You need great content that your ideal customer wants to read. Content includes more than words. It includes visual content around those words. And then the information must be accessible to your audience such as blogs, videos, podcasts, infographics, or some other format. This is the essence of content marketing is drawing your ideal customer to you based on the words and visuals you use to make their life easier, solve a problem, or provide information.
Use a big picture strategy to content marketing.
If you’re new to content marketing, creating content can seem like an overwhelming task. But it doesn’t have to be. Use a Big Picture strategy. Plan your content annually to tell your story over the year. Ask yourself these two questions:
- What journey do you want to take your audience on throughout the year?
- What holidays or events happen around your business throughout the year?
Step One: What journey will you take your clients on over the year?
Let’s say you’re a massage therapist specializing in working with active clients. Your ideal customer is someone who gets out and enjoys life, has a moderately disposable income, and uses massage to get the kinks out so they can play again the next weekend. Your *big* journey for the year might be to give tips and tricks for recovery using self-massage, stretching, and balms and other products.
Step Two: How do the holidays and events play into your content marketing strategy and journey?
The next step involves writing out the months and placing holidays and events within each month. For example:
- January – New Year
- February – Valentine’s Day
- March – March Madness Basketball (as an example )
It is your choice whether to include religious holidays, such as Easter or Passover and Christmas or Chanukah. Instead of religious holidays, you can use spring break and winter break. However, this is entirely up to you. If there is a big race in your hometown that happens every year in June, write that down. Most cities have a Turkey Trot around Thanksgiving. Write that down.
Your calendar should have one event and/or holiday per month. Within each month, broadly apply topics based on your annual theme into each month. For example:
- January – New Year; recovering from holiday over-indulgence
- February – Valentine’s Day; finding your sweet spot
- March – March Madness Basketball; using massage to ramp up
Step three: Shake out your content into weeks
Next, break that content into weeks – one post per week. So, in January, to support the new year, you’re going to write about recovering from holiday over-indulgence as it pertains to active adults. January’s blog titles might be something like this:
- Get Active to Shake Holiday Over-indulgence
- Don’t Forget to Stretch
- 5 Ways to Recover from Your Exercise New Year’s Resolutions Using Self-Massage
- Using *Magic* Balm for Muscle Recovery
Plan your entire year – or at a minimum the first six months. By the end of this *big* picture strategy you will have a written calendar with 52 blog titles relating back to, in this example, using self-massage, stretching, and products to stay in tip-top shape for active adults.
That’s it! That is all you have to do right now.
Whew!
To write your content calendar, change your scenery for optimum creativity.
Developing a content marketing calendar requires a bit of creativity. So, before beginning any of this, find time you can dedicate and change up your scenery. Give yourself at least 2 hours. Go to your zen space with a pen and paper. I recommend writing everything out the old-fashioned way. You can add it to a digital calendar or app later. I also use two or three different color inks – pink and purple, sometimes blue.
What’s up next in Content Creation?
In part 2 of this series, I’ll show you techniques to use to actually write the content. And in part 3, I will show you how to use an integration strategy to post your content across multiple channels. Don’t worry. I’ve got your back!
