Introduction
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Content creation is one of the fundamental pillars of any digital strategy for a social media marketer. The quality and frequency of your content will improve the communication you transmit about your business or product and will attract new clients. Planning your content in social networks in terms of format, day, frequency, etc., will allow you to take the time to produce the valuable content that your ideal customer is waiting for.
As we have already seen in the previous module, some publication formats work better than others on each platform, which is why you should consider having profiles on different social networks that you will treat differently but always maintain the same style to generate or reinforce the identity of your client's business.
The planning will be a good reference and will help you to have some milestones in mind, but it can be flexible and modified according to the needs, for example, an unforeseen event
1. Set your goal:
Having a clear goal will lead your content strategy. Answer this: What do you (your client) want? To become a referent in your niche, to captivate an audience, to increase the number of sales, to capture new customers…
Setting a goal will help you analyse the results and know if your strategy is successful or not. For example, if you want to sell more, you can set a goal of "increasing sales from 400 to 600 in one month".
2. Adapt to the audience:
You cannot use the same language for a teenage audience of 15-22 years old as for a group of adults of 38-50 years old. Keep your target audience in mind when designing the message, the type of language, the type of images, if they might be interested in an informative article or a funny video... The goal is to capture their attention.
3. Define the pillars of your content:
It is easy for some topics to generate unwanted controversy such as politics or religion. Better to avoid them!
You can define your content pillars taking into account your ideal client as an inspiration to help, motivate, excite and transform them.
For example, a craft bakery will have themes related to its expertise such as: healthy types of bread, differences between types of grain, recipes and ideas to make at home with their products, stories of generations of bakers, explanations about the yeast fermentation process, the best ways to knead, why their bread is better or different from the rest... These would be their pillars.
4. Make a content calendar:
By having the themes or pillars ready, you can plan them on a calendar by placing a theme each day. Following the example above, to publish on Instagram:
- Monday: Motivational quote related to the bread/grain
- Tuesday: Information on the bread of the week
- Wednesday: Fermentation processes
- Thursday: Bakers' stories
- Friday: Recipe with bread
So, you begin to give order and structure to the contents but your contents can vary and your calendar can be flexible, e.g., if the bakery organizes a catering, or participates in a competition, that special event must be known at least one week in advance and included in your calendar.
Task
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Your task is to create a content plan for a week on social networks that you consider appropriate for a particular business:
1. Choose the social network or social networks if you want to have more than one platform
2. How many times are you going to publish something a day?
3. What time of day?
4. What is the purpose of the publication?
5. What topic or pillar will you write about each day?
6. Are you going to link to other sources or platforms?
7. What visual content do you need?
8. What will be the text of your message?
