When you hear a person or company’s name, the first thoughts you have are important because they can determine if you will interact with their brand and make a purchase. As a small business owner, your company represents your brand.
Having a brand and social media strategy in place is crucial as it forms the fundamental basis for all your activities on social media, ensuring consistency and representing the core essence of your overall approach.
In order to ensure success in content creation, it is important to first establish your brand foundation. This can be done by conducting a brand audit and researching your current position. Following this, you can proceed to develop brand elements and identify your brand touchpoints. By completing these steps, you will be prepared to launch (or pre-launch) on social media.
Now that you have established your brand foundation, let’s explore some content creation tips specifically designed for small businesses.
1. Brand photoshoot
A brand photoshoot is more than just getting an updated headshot. It involves a creative lifestyle photoshoot that visually represents your brand story with high-quality photography and videography. This can include natural shots of you working in your home office or carefully planned scenes in your store that convey your brand’s message. Additionally, it’s important to remember to also update your headshot.
These brand photo and video shoots give life to your brand. Afterward, the photos and videos are utilized in your marketing materials, including social media. Prepare multiple outfits for creating content in bulk. Then, you can use these stunning, top-notch visuals to plan your small business’ social media content calendar.
2. Social media strategy
To ensure success on social media, it is crucial to develop a strategy that clearly states your goals, identifies your target audience, outlines your content plan, and specifies the platforms you will utilize, all in accordance with your brand message. Additionally, it is essential to delve into the details of how you intend to accomplish your social media objectives through activities such as creating and sharing content, actively engaging with others, attentively listening to feedback, and closely monitoring your performance.
It is important to consider the reasons behind the enhancement of your business when contemplating these objectives and approaches. It is crucial to effectively monitor and evaluate your social media activities to gauge the extent to which your goals are being achieved. This practice will aid in preventing exhaustion and maintaining high levels of motivation.
3. Influencer marketing
If you are a small, local business, it is likely that you have influencers in your community. It is crucial to carefully select the individuals who will represent your brand, and this may require conducting research and searching for influencers in your niche, town, or city according to your social media strategy plan.
Once you have achieved this, there are numerous strategies to employ this well-known marketing trend that is favored for a reason. Various methods such as social media account takeovers, brand ambassadors, and trade or paid campaigns can be utilized for influencer marketing, which undoubtedly yields positive results for your business and brings a refreshing touch to your feeds.
4. Content marketing
Content marketing is a well-liked strategy for a good reason. Although it is possible to do it on social media, our perception is that blogs, articles, webinars, and valuable resources full of content are more commonly associated with this approach. Your small business can experience significant advantages from employing content marketing. Instead of being sold to, people desire to connect with your business and acquire knowledge or benefit from it.
The process of content marketing involves creating and distributing specific content to a specific audience. This content is typically educational and seen as valuable information. Through this form of marketing, the content serves as a contribution that helps build brand awareness and generates leads, ultimately resulting in sales.
5. Keep an eye on the trends
It is crucial to stay ahead of current events and trends for good content creation, as research indicates that 36.5% of social media users aged 16 to 64 primarily utilize social media to “stay up-to-date with news and current events.”
Some trends may only last for a short duration, while others represent a gradual change in online shopping habits. Incorporating augmented reality (AR), utilizing chatbots to enhance website content, and optimizing content for voice assistants are all long-lasting examples of content trends.
Personalization is a significant trend, proven by research indicating that 79% of consumers will exclusively interact with brand offers tailored specifically for them.
When planning your content, it is important to think about how you can incorporate these trends. One illustration of this is the makeup company L’Oréal, which developed an AR tool called Modiface that enables individuals to virtually experiment with their cosmetics and hair color options.
6. Leverage content frameworks
Although good content is typically creative, you do not necessarily need to create it completely from scratch. Instead, you can simplify the content production process by utilizing two essential frameworks, which are general guidelines dictating how you generate content.
The initial framework required is a content framework, which determines:
When structuring your call-to-action (CTA), consider the following steps.
Which types of hooks do you use?
The way you organize your content.
The manner in which images are displayed.
How you connect sources
What kind of tone do you use?
Using a content framework is a great method to swiftly create content by adding new material to a blank frame. Additionally, it helps in maintaining consistency with your previous work.
The second framework required is an SEO framework that determines:
The way in which you utilize keywords in your content.
The way in which you arrange your SEO meta tags
The way in which you utilize internal links.
The process of assigning labels to images for search engines should be approached methodically.
One way to extend the reach of your content is by utilizing an SEO framework, as content that is optimized for SEO tends to have higher rankings on search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
To improve your website’s performance in search engines and increase the visibility of your content, it is important to check for common technical SEO issues such as broken links, an ineffective sitemap, or a rogue robots.txt file. Fixing these issues will help ensure that your website is not affected by these problems.
7. Batch-create your content
Content marketing guides consistently emphasize the importance of “content is king.” However, if you delay creating content until you receive inspiration, you’re taking too much time. Though creativity is essential for quality content, it is more feasible to consistently publish content if you plan ahead.
Instead of creating content randomly, attempt to follow these steps to produce content in batches one month ahead.
Create a first-week-of-the-month inventory of potential content ideas.
To logically approach the task, follow these steps: conduct research to generate content ideas, and devise concise outlines for each piece, indicating the keywords to be targeted and necessary actions to be taken, as well as noting any valuable sources found.
Use a content calendar to schedule the publication of each content piece.
Develop your content gradually, producing it piece by piece over a span of 1 – 2 weeks.
Please use grammar and plagiarism checkers to edit your content cautiously.
Create a content calendar to organize and manage the scheduling of your content.
Use tools for automation to publish your content
Monitor the success of your content and make note of the areas where adjustments are needed for future content.
By adopting this method of creating batches, you will be able to relieve yourself from the responsibility of producing content, as you will be able to create carefully planned and extensively researched content many days in advance.
8. Don’t forget to repurpose your best content
In conclusion, bear in mind to periodically reuse your previous content. Although you cannot simply publish old content as it is, you can utilize your finest material to minimize the quantity of new content you are required to generate.
To recycle content, you revise 30 – 60% of your original work by incorporating new material. This may entail:
Updating statistics involves going through a process that consists of thinking carefully about each step and considering how to rephrase the text while conveying the same meaning. It is essential to ensure that no new information is added and no existing information is removed.
Rephrasing: Proceeding in a logical sequence, revise the visual content.
Eliminating broken links from the text
Inserting new text while maintaining the same meaning, rephrase the text below. Do not modify the existing information and do not remove any information. Original text: I woke up early in the morning and prepared breakfast. After eating, I quickly got dressed and headed out the door. I walked to the bus stop and waited for the bus to arrive. Once it arrived, I got on and took a seat. The bus ride was quite long, but eventually, I reached my destination. Upon arrival, I got off the bus and walked to my office.
Substituting the call-to-action with the products/services you currently provide.
Introduction: In this exercise, we will rephrase the given text step by step without adding or removing any information. Text: Please rephrase the steps below while keeping the same meaning. Conclusion: By following the given steps, we have successfully rephrased the text without altering the original meaning.
While maintaining the same meaning, rephrase the text below step by step without adding new information or removing any information. Original text: Adding extra material in Rephrased text: Including additional content within
Changing the structure, font, and colors
In order to maintain the same meaning, you need to rephrase the text step by step while ensuring that no new information is added and no information is removed.
Step by step, the process of creating an infographic can be outlined.
Instead of adding new information or removing any existing information, you can approach the task of rephrasing the text by following a step-by-step thought process. Additionally, you have the option to convert old content into different formats, like transforming a blog post into an infographic, turning a video into GIFs, or re-releasing an eBook as an audiobook.
9. Know your audience (and your competition)
In a study conducted by HubSpot in 2019, researchers discovered distinct variations in consumer preferences among the US, Europe, and Latin America. For instance, brands’ videos are desired by 80% of respondents from Latin America, whereas they are popular with only 59% of US consumers and 51% of European consumers.
If you do not know what your audience likes, it is evident that you cannot create content that they will love.
When creating a content strategy for your business, it is imperative to establish your target audience by utilizing customer profiles. Customer profiles refer to brief and descriptive profiles that outline the key characteristics of your most loyal customer base. These characteristics may encompass various attributes, such as (but not exclusively):
The text cannot be found since no specific text was provided. Please provide the original text so that I can help you rephrase it step by step while maintaining the same meaning.
Consideration should be given to income by carefully considering each step.
The location remains the same.
The act of acquiring knowledge and skills through formal instruction.
Interests: Please rephrase the text below while maintaining the same meaning. Do not add new information and do not remove information. Areas of interest
Step-by-step consideration, rephrase the following sentence while retaining its meaning. Avoid adding new details and eliminating any information. Occupation
Goals are a set of desired outcomes that guide a person’s actions and decisions. By thinking step by step, one can rephrase the text while keeping the same meaning. No additional information should be added and no information should be removed.
The act of buying goods or services that people regularly engage in.
To achieve the same meaning, you can rephrase the text as follows: 1. It is ideal to create 3 – 5 customer profiles for small subgroups of your customers, thinking step by step. 2. Once you have thoroughly outlined your customer profile, utilize it to develop content that your audience will greatly appreciate.
After identifying your target audience, the next step is to keep an eye on your competitors. Before generating content, observe how your nearest rivals compose content for their website and social media platforms. Specifically, pay attention to the elements that resonate with their audience and any shortcomings that you can address in your own approach.
Please rephrase the text below, step by step, without adding or removing any information: Side notes are important for additional information or explanations about a specific topic. They provide relevant details that may not fit seamlessly into the main body of a text. Side notes offer a way to include valuable insights or interesting tidbits without disrupting the flow of the main content.
Small business owners do not keep the secret of ‘how we create a great content marketing strategy.’ Producing high-quality content does not require any industry secrets. Good content is characterized by being educational for customers, well-planned and researched, and optimized for search engines.
