Stuck in an endless cycle of content creation?

It can be exhausting to come up with new content ideas for your business, day after day after day. Especially as you expand your business onto new social platforms, it’s hard to keep up. That’s why it’s so important to come up with a content creation process: a system you can rely on to make content creation as painless as possible. 

In this post, I’ll show you how to streamline that process and create a content strategy for social media that works for you and your business. Follow the five steps of my content strategy template to create more content in less time, and with less effort.

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Keep reading or listen to the podcast below: 

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Step #1: Planning Content.

A good content strategy for social media starts at the level of creation. Set yourself up for success by planning all of your content in advance, across every social network. 

Tip: If you’re still getting your business off the ground, I recommend starting with just one platform. Master content creation on that platform before expanding to other social networks. Don’t try to do all the things!

You can still learn how to create a content strategy for an omnipresence, but these tips will apply on a smaller scale for you right now (for example, you might repurpose Instagram stories to posts or reels, instead of to another platform). After you’ve grown your presence on your first platform, it will be much easier to expand. 

Try to approach each content idea from multiple perspectives. For example, turn the same core idea into a step-by-step infographic, an Instagram story with client testimonials, a reel that talks about the same topic, etc. Not only will this tactic save you energy, but it will also make repurposing easier down the road!

Another reason why you should plan your content altogether, is so that each piece of content compounds on the ones that came before. The goal of this content creation process is to bring your followers on a customer journey that ends in a sale. In order to do that, each post should build off the last, to make your marketing as effective as possible. 

Tip: Reuse ideas from longer form content (blog posts, Youtube videos, podcast episodes) by breaking it into smaller pieces (Instagram posts, stories, etc.). 

Resources:

30 Days of Instagram Story Ideas 

How to Come Up with Social Media Content Ideas & Create Standout Value

How to Create an Instagram Sales Funnel Using the Customer’s Journey 

Step #2: Storing and organizing content.

PS: Repurposing content will be a literal nightmare if you skip this stage! 

Yes content creation itself is important, but if you want to be both effective and streamlined you need a system for storing and organizing your content. This will help not only to prepare you to create content more fluidly but also to be able to find, analyze and reuse content in the future. I recommend using ClickUp to store and organize all your content, but you can also use Airtable or Google Drive. The system you use is less important than having a set process in place.

For example, I store and organize all my content in ClickUp. When I create a podcast episode, my team and I will outline it, create the graphics, make the edits and upload the audio all within ClickUp. We also have a column for repurposing that notes different ways we will use that episode in the future. 

Create a tagging system to mark your most popular posts, record data/analytics, and organize your content by date, program, platform, or any other system that you find helpful. 

Resources:

How to Use ClickUp

Top Tools & Apps for Entrepreneurs (Under $50!) 

Step #3: Create Content.

Now that you have a strategic big picture plan and a system to organize your content, it’s time to come up with ideas and actually create!

I recommend batching the different parts of the creation process from brainstorming to caption writing to photography etc. You can watch this video here with more batching tips.

Resources:

How to Come Up with Content Ideas

Creating Content That Converts: 3 Steps to Success

5 Social Media Post Ideas for Business

Step #4: Multiply the impact.

This is when you take one piece of content and share it across multiple platforms. This could look like sharing the link to your podcast episode in a Facebook group, on your Instagram stories and on LinkedIn. You don’t need to make all these different posts or fancy graphics but rather spread the single core content and multiply the visibility and impact.

The goal isn’t just to share everywhere. Be intentional and think about what would be most beneficial to your business at that time. For example, if you have a launch coming up, what types of content fit best with your sales plan?

Resources:

Instagram Stories for Business: 10 Ideas to Increase Sales 

How to Grow Your Business on Instagram

Step #5: Repurpose content.

In this step, rather than spreading the same idea across platforms, you are reusing content in a totally new format (ie. turning a Youtube video into a blog post). Another way to do this is to take old content and reuse it (this blog post started as a podcast episode!). 

If you had an amazing idea, there’s no shame in reusing it again. Your audience will still find it helpful in this new format. My team and I often reuse captions from past launches and simply modify them rather than starting from scratch.

Resources:

​​10 Ways to Repurpose Content

Batching Content: How to Create Consistent Content as an Entrepreneur

How to Create a Content Strategy for Social Media: Action Steps

To recap, here are the steps you need to take to get started on your content creation process:

1. List out the social platforms you’re currently active on.
2. Start planning big picture with a strategy based on sales.
3. Map out a system/process for creation, storage and organization.
4. Block off time to create.
5. Decide how you will go about multiplying and repurposing each core piece of content.

If you’re interested in learning more about content creation, make sure you check out the Content Kit for Instagram, which will show you how to create a month’s worth of content in a single afternoon.

Don’t forget to subscribe to my Youtube channel, follow me on Instagram, and join the Facebook group–you’ll be able to see this content strategy template in action! 

Keep Reading

How to Make Money on Instagram in 2021

Scale an Online Business and Hire Your Dream Team 

How to Build an Email List From Scratch

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