Your Go-To Content Marketing Strategy for 2021

Do you have a content plan that A) doesn't stress or overwhelm you and B) you know drives you more revenue to your business (ie your content gets you more clients or more sales). If you are having a hard time planning your content marketing plan or even struggle with what to post let's dive into the first steps you should take to creating your content strategy!

According to HubSpot's Not Another State of Marketing report, almost 70% of businesses are actively investing in a content marketing plan so how will yours stand out without burning you out?

Let's run through the steps you can take to make sure your content marketing plan will help you build your business and at the end, I'm going to share some ways to help you come up with content ideas if you struggle with coming up with ideas.

First - I've said this about YouTube channels many times but it holds true for your content marketing plan too... you need to know WHO you are talking to. And don't just mean a woman ages 24 - 45... these are demographics, you really want to think deep and think about the psychographics of your audience.

What problems does your target audience have? How can you relate to them? What types of foods, drinks, or shows do they like? The more you can start weaving in these types of things to your content strategy, the more you become more like a friend to them. The more they will be excited to engage with you, learn more about you, and even share your content.

My challenge here for you is to start to think about things you can incorporate into your content that your audience likes to make that connection with informing and entertaining. 

For me I like to talk about my zen time being when I can watch any real housewives season with a glass of red wine, balancing working and virtual kindergarten these days, and trying to find a hobby outside of my work

The second thing you need to do for your content marketing plan is to decide on ONE PILLAR Piece of content. For example, for me, it's my YouTube channel. For you, it might be a blog post and podcast episode. What's your one piece of content each week that's going to be that big meaty piece of content that your audience is going to get HUGE value from?

This means you don't have to create this massive content piece on all the social platforms. Yes, you can breathe now, you don't have to be creating content for all the platforms! But what you can do is repurpose your Pillar content! 

For example this year in particular we are going all out for repurposing these YouTube video so you might see this video turned into:

• Video instagram stories

• Graphic instagram stories

• Instagram feed quote graphic

• Instagram feed carousel graphic

• 5+ Pins

• Facebook quote graphics

• LinkedIn article

• Linked In quote graphics

BUT the way to make this doable is to create a template for each of these assets in software like Canva so you can easily pump these out over and over again. And you DON'T have to do this, it's an option if you have the bandwidth or you have someone helping you

You are going to only commit to that weekly, meaty pillar content!

Now that you know your pillar content to make sure your content marketing strategy actually achieves what you want it to, you need to decide what your goal of that content is.

I like to have a single goal for every video I put out and sometimes a secondary goal. What happens is when you have too many goals for one piece of content your viewer/reader gets confused and doesn't take any action, thus the time you spent on that piece of content was all for nothing right!

Your content goals can be to:

• Subscribe to your channel

• Get your freebie

• Comment on your post

• Share your post

• Watch another video

• Book a discovery call with you

• Send a DM

The key here is to know what the singular goal of your pillar piece of content is going to be if you want it to work for you!

The next part of creating your content marketing strategy is actually creating that content... and I highly recommend some type of batching system. Now batching doesn't need to be something crazy like filming 10 Youtube videos in one day... yes I've done that BUT I was able to do that because that's my style of batching. I love the camera so the camera gives me energy, whereas the camera may exhaust you, and doing 3 seems like a lot.

So when it comes to batching your content I want you to think about what's doable for you and your lifestyle. There just needs to be a clear system that you are following so you can stay consistent.

I have a client who does marketing Monday's, so every Monday is when she is working on her content marketing pieces, filming the YouTube video for that week, writing whatever content that needs to get done.

I'm currently working on a more marketing Wednesday where I batch as much video content as possible - Youtube videos, reels and possibly even going on IG live that day... NUMBER 1 reason being, Wednesday are the only day my kids aren't home and the second reason is that that's just one day I have to do my hair and make-up! 

There are other tasks you want to start thinking about batching too. Maybe spend time batching a bunch of templates inside of Canva for Pinterest or Instagram or Youtube thumbnails. You might want to also batch research what content to create!

You could also batch scripting your video content - if you do script your video content it will be pretty easy to use as blog posts or even Instagram captions. And even batching editing - videos or graphics. 

Batching is a not so secret productivity powerhouse many online business owners and entrepreneurs do to be efficient with their time

Then you need to have a content management system or a project management tool. When you are creating weekly content for your content marketing plan, you can see there are a lot of steps the do into this to make sure it works for you. Instead of keeping a process or all your to do's on paper, create on master to do in a project management system and duplicate it every single time for a new piece of content.

Let me show you how I use a project management tool called asana to manage my pillar content, my Youtube channel

Click the video above to tune into the video and see the behind on the scenes of my project management system!