Must haves in your content calendar ideas for engagement
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If you’re a creative business owner, you’ve probably been trying to create content with the intent of engaging your audience for as long as you’ve been in business.
Your content could be from:
YouTube videos
Pinterest Pins
Instagram Reels, Graphics or Stories
Blog Posts
Podcasts
or any number of things…
But no matter what you do, the content you create isn’t engaging the audience you want. The audience you find isn’t buying or interacting with your services the way you want.
Here’s why you aren’t creating the content buzz you were anticipating, and how you can change it.
Table of Contents
What is content marketing?
Content creation isn’t equal
What is owned media content creation
How does social media content creation compare
Content calendars and how to use them
How do you align and repurpose content?
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is the intent to change your audience’s actions in regards toward your business through your content.
When I first started delving into content marketing strategy, it became apparent how overarching and necessary a plan was to execute this well. The ability to influence an audience with the intent to change behavior needs extensive knowledge of a target audience and a content calendar to understand when and where the audience will interact with the services and products.
Content marketing strategies take a look at your audience’s journey to determine how your audience interacts with your business first.
Determining how the target audience will best engage with your small business is how you or your marketing team should start finding where your audience is on different platforms.
Content creation isn’t equal
Many people have seen and experienced how different media impact a brand.
A video can garner a million views and be deemed as a viral piece of content creation for a brand, while the same thing can happen for a tweet for another.
Creating both pieces of content are valid.
The main point of content marketing is aligning content creation initiatives with where and what your audience will enjoy. If your audience can react in a way the business intends them to, the content marketing initiatives is working.
There are many types of content creation that can interact with your audience, but it’s not just videos, blogs, and social media platforms to be concerned about yet.
What is owned media content creation
Your content marketing needs to focus on:
Owned platforms. This can be websites, podcasts, blogs, anything that your content calendar is safely on your platform.
Social platforms. This is more widely known with social media and interactive with your audience but seen as a third-party to your business.
Partner platforms. This content creation is affiliated with your business but supported by another, such as apps that you’ve developed but are run elsewhere.
Creating content on platforms that you own should be a priority.
This is why in my free content calendar, I only utilize up to three platforms to choose from but also incorporate owned media, such as email, blogs, and podcasts.
How does social media content creation compare
As businesses have become aware of, social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram can crash at any point in time, and if those are your only ways of marketing your business or creating awareness, you’re missing opportunities to interact with your audience.
Social media is still a great way to build connections and promote content created from your website or other media, but it shouldn’t be the only way you promote your content.
Cross-platform promotion is a great way to schedule a content marketing strategy that generates buzz about your content creation methods while still owning the content that you produce.
Content calendars and how to use them
Different media types will interact with your audience at different times of your audience’s journey.
Many content calendar idea posts will offer suggestions like:
insights into your business
what your offer is
a day in the life
weekend relaxation
off-the-clock content
But content marketing calendars shouldn’t be focusing on you. Your focus, when creating a content calendar, and content calendar ideas, should remain focused on your target audience and how to address their challenges with your services or products.
If you’ve been following along, you know now to know your customer’s journey through your brand and business. You’ll understand the main objective to reaching your intended goal, whether that’s sales or increasing awareness or a bigger subscriber list.
Each month determine what you want to achieve with your target audience and how you can work with them to achieve those content marketing goals. What can you help with to impact their lives that month when you create your content?
How do you align and repurpose content?
You might focus on three to five topics within that objective that help your target audience each month and repurpose those topics in new ways, both across platforms and media.
Each week, as you can see in my free content strategy calendar, I select one topic and aligning the challenges that my target audience faces. This way, I’m merely repurposing my content in a way without burning out but still giving fresh perspectives on the challenges my target audience is facing.
I also determine one to three platforms my target audience is most likely to be engaged with. The platforms my target audience engage with will be different from yours but knowing them well will help you determine the best ones to utilize.
Once I know which platforms to use, I cross platform my content.
This could be something like using a video as a carousel post on Instagram or pulling a quote from a podcast into a tweet.
Not only does this save me time when developing my content creation strategy, but it still aligns with my target audience and their customer journey when going through my brand and business goals.
create your custom content calendar
Content marketing is meant to help impact your target audience through the content you create.
By creating content that aligns with your target audience, you’ll save time without guessing what your ideal client will want to learn from you and you’ll be able to repurpose the content you’ve created across multiple platforms.
Want a custom content marketing plan? Fill out the form on Work with Me to collaborate with me and develop a content marketing plan to increase your target audience’s engagement with your content creation ideas.
Not ready to work 1:1 with me? Get my free content schedule strategy calendar to organize your content marketing strategy at your pace.
