Have you ever had to do something but you didn’t know where to start? Imagine, you’re invited to a party, and you’re asked to make your Aunt Martha’s famous chocolate chip cookies. You’ve admired Aunt Martha’s cookies and eaten them before, but you have no Earthly idea how to make them. You hop onto Google and start looking up various chocolate chip cookie recipes. Every one of them is so different that you spend hours trying to figure out which might be the right one. Did they have butter or shortening? Maybe both? What about the type of flour?
Creating content without a plan is like cooking without a recipe.
This cookie analogy is what content marketing was to me. After being asked to help my clients with their social media, I found myself looking for definite answers to the right and wrong way to create content for social media marketing. Branding, I know inside and out, but to help someone with their online presence was a whole other animal (or baked goods in this case) that stretched my brand knowledge into the execution stage.
I cannot even count the number of articles and books I’ve read on the subject. Neil Patel is very generous with his knowledge as well as Hubspot, CoSchedule, and countless others. The reason they are generous? They are performing content marketing on the subject of “content marketing.” (MIND BLOWN!)
There is a ton of free, quality information out there, but it doesn’t necessarily make it any easier for you to whip up a tasty batch of social media content. The people I work with (me too) are busy! It is difficult to parse all that knowledge into something that you can put into action for your business.
[bctt tweet="There is a ton of free, quality information out there,
but it doesn't necessarily make it any easier for you to whip up a
tasty batch of social media content." username=""]
Wouldn’t it be easier if you already had the recipe? Something you could follow and know that what you produced would be delicious and satisfying to your social media audience. I know that it is something I would love to have, so I created one.
I created a process and a planner that breaks up the process of content creating in steps, like a recipe, keeping things clear to prevent overwhelm. I’m not going to lie. Creating content still isn’t easy. It is work, but with a plan, you can have repeatable success over and over again.
Stay tuned as I put this planner through the motions on my own content marketing. Not practicing what I preach has always been one of my shortcomings, but now it is time to set an example. I am a visual communicator that doesn’t like to write, but even I can generate blog content so long as I follow the recipe.
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