Create a content marketing plan that makes you MORE MONEY!
I've been creating content for 5 years now and each year not only have I changed or tweaked my content marketing strategy BUT I've been about to double my business revenue every year!
In this post, I'm going to show you how to:
Make sure the content you create actually helps you achieve your goals, whether that's to make more sales of your digital products, book more clients, or grow a social following.
Show you how to start planning all your content out on a calendar so you can set due dates so you do it.
My secret process to working smarter with the content you create and not harder... (aka how to repurpose the crap out of your core weekly content!)
Just a little pre-work here, the tools I will be talking about to create this plan is a project management tool called Asana - you can do everything I show you here today for FREE on Asana!
I like to have a plan for my business for 90 days to 6 months out because this allows me to work in things like vacations, holidays, time off. Then I like to add in when I'm launching or promoting something. You can see I'm having a virtual summit called the Video Reframed Summit at the end of February so I have that on my calendar. I'm also planning a launch in March.
You could be launching an ebook, a new 1 on 1 client services, or maybe you launch a new YouTube video every Thursday and you want to promote that!
You must put the things on the calendar that you DON'T want to be working on, then add the work and content around YOUR schedule... remember we don't want the content creation treadmill working you!
First up, we need to make sure your content ACHIEVES something. This was a HUGE mistake I did my first few years. I was creating content because I thought I had to create content! Instead of creating content for the sake of creating content, we're going to set goals for that content to make sure we're working towards that goal.
Without knowing the goal of your content, you won't even know if it's working. Your first step here in creating your content marketing plan is to write down your marketing goals. This will be your compass and help you know what you should be creating and if your content marketing plan is working.
Some ideas:
Grow your email list 1000 subscribers
Get 5 client inquires
Sell 30% digital products
Your goals will also affect the calls to action you will be including in your content.
Now these goals can change monthly, quarterly, yearly. It's what you feel comfortable doing. I like to work in my business with 90-day chunks or quarterly. Every 90 days I will set my content marketing goals, review them at the end of the quarter, and set new for the next 90 days.
Next, let's start getting this on a calendar because here's the deal - if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
The first thing I recommend adding to your calendar is when you are going to create your pillar content for your content marketing plan. For me, my weekly pillar content is this YouTube video, so I need a quiet house... a day I can send my 4 and 5 year old to nana's, and I day I don't have anything on my calendar so I can batch as much video content as possible.
Before this year I was doing this once a month. Usually the last Wednesday of the month. I didn't book anything on these days and I didn't add ANY to-dos on my list to get done. This Wednesday was solely for getting presentable and creating as much video content as possible.
This year though, I'm saving EVERY Wednesday for content creation. I have personally felt the need to be a little more timely with my content, want to give myself more freedom to switch around ideas PLUS more time to create MORE video content like Reels, live streams and updating and adding new content to my program, Video Strategy Academy.
Your action step here is deciding when you are going to create content. There is no right way here, you can do one day for the full 30 days, you could do a marketing Monday where every Monday you create your marketing content. Whatever you decide on, it needs to be on your calendar and you have to be committed to doing it! You HAVE to make time for it.
Once you know when you are creating, then you need to find time before to plan and research that content.
Yep! I don't recommend doing all of this in one day UNTIL you can. Here's why I don't.
For me to plan this particular video it took about an hour! Not only did I research the best angle for this video, how to optimize this video for YouTube, the best way to title it, what the thumbnail was going to be but I also scripted it out.
You can see why you will also need to add time to your calendar for planning your content. Another reason it's a good idea to plan your content is that it makes your future self's life easier. If I sat down here, on a Wednesday to film, without a plan, this video wouldn't be as jammed packed of valuable tips for you because I wouldn't have researched what you want to actually see in this video.
Taking the time to plan makes filming video content easier AND as I'm about to show you, repurposing video content easier too!
Now let me share how I'm able to pump out LOADS of content without being stressed and overwhelmed!
We have a content repurpose strategy for our content marketing strategy. In the video above, I'm going to show you how I use Asana to map all of this out. However, before we dig into that, I want to talk you through how you could easily turn a YouTube video into over 10+ pieces of content so you could maximize your content marketing plan.
First, I'll script a video for Youtube. We now have text to create -
Instagram captions
Instagram quote cards
Instagram carousel posts
Blog posts
LinkedIn posts
Newsletter content
That 6 different pieces of content already from just your script! See why I said scripting was important!
Then once I film the YouTube video, I will film an alternate ending for Facebook and Instagram TV
Something I'm trying new right now (as a case study) is SEEing if I can get people from Facebook or Instagram to my Youtube channel since my content marketing goal right now is to grow my channel.
So we are putting about 2 -3 minutes of this video on FB and IGTV and I'm filming an ending that says you can watch the complete video over on my Youtube channel and post the link to the video in the comments. Again this is a current case study we are doing - if you would like to hear the outcome make sure you subscribe to my update in 90 days.
Then something we did all of 2020 is add the complete video to Facebook and IGTV with platform specific calls to action. In 2020, it was more important for me to build my credibility and visibility than to grow my YouTube channel and try to send everyone to my channel - I just needed more people to see my content.
Then we took 15 second clips for IG Stories. We also condensed videos into Reels to test how repurposing a long form piece of content into a reel would work!
Ok, we are at over 13 DIFFERENT pieces of content you can create from just ONE YouTube video!
Now let's keep this all nicely organized because this can seem like a lot of moving pieces - I'll show you how we do this in Asana. Click the video above to get the full behind the scenes!
