Tell me, is it a trend? A new look you’re trying out? I’m talking about all the hats you’re wearing as a business owner. Not that they don’t look chic on you, but when you’re a solo entrepreneur, wearing all the hats and doing all the things, time is tight. Very tight!
Being busy is no bad thing: it suggests the business is going well, but it also means you have very little time to focus on your marketing, especially your social media marketing. I’m amazed by every single one of you business owners, and I want to give you the help you deserve by sharing some of my surefire content creation ideas. These tried and tested methods will have you saving time and maintaining productivity.
Create Content Themes
Content themes are topics or categories related to your business: your brand identity, values and business story, which ensure you stay on message in your social media (and all other) comms. Typically you have between 4-6 overall themes, and you can develop sub-topics beneath each one. Let me give you an example: imagine you’re a business coach; you may have the following themes for your business –
- Entrepreneurship
- Productivity
- Career development
- Business growth
…but that’s just the start. Create sub-topics from each, and you’ll soon have a map of content themes that help with that dreaded blank page, i.e.
- Entrepreneurship
- Portfolio careers
- Productivity
- Time management
- Career development
- Networking
- Business growth
- Growth mindset
Get the drift? A good old brainstorming session is the best place to start. Start by creating post-it notes, cue cards or even a text doc of those top-level themes, then break them down further.
Create a Content Bank
A content bank is a safe place where you keep all the random content ideas that pop into your head throughout the day. Content gold can strike anywhere – in the shower, on the commute, or inspired by talking to others. What’s important is being able to capture it quickly with an easy way of referring back when the time comes to plan social media content. For me, this means keeping a Google doc up-to-date, but you can use whatever system works for you – the notes section on your phone, Evernote, Trello or simply a well-thumbed notepad.
Create Templates
Use templates wherever possible. This means you don’t have to create content from scratch. You can get these from online graphic designing tools, such as Canva (where you can create a brand kit to make things quicker), a graphic designer or a subscription company such as yourtemplateclub.com.
I would suggest having a variety of templates ready for carousel posts, static posts, quotes, video covers and stories. That way, you can simply add your content and images quickly, with no time-consuming design necessary.
Reuse Your Existing Content
I have a friend whose mum, in a very frugal 1980s way, used to serve her family YMCA for dinner – Yesterday’s Muck Cooked Again. It was her way of stretching out a bit of meat or a casserole into 2 or 3 more dinners. Why am I telling you this? Well, as much as it’s a reminder of how far we’ve come in culinary terms (thank god for Masterchef), it’s a good lesson for us content creators.
Far from me saying your existing content is muck (it’s not, it’s manna from heaven), the same repurposing can be done with that long piece of content you spent ages agonising over. Turn that long-form piece into little social portions, and you’ll really be maximising its potential. Here are some examples:
- Turn that webinar into a blog post.
- Make that blog post into a reel.
- Transform your IGTV video into a TikTok short.
- Repurpose your TikTok into a newsfeed post.
- Repost that top-performing newsfeed post from last year into a new one.
See what I’m doing here? Don’t scrabble to find new content all the time – pick content at the top of your content pyramid (long-form content) and slice and dice. Content à la mode, cooked two ways.
Content Batching
You may be forgiven for thinking I’m sticking to the culinary theme here, but I’m not. When I talk about ‘batching’, I’m not talking about family meal planning here; I’m talking about content creation. Content batching is a productivity technique where you create all of your captions or visual content during a set period of time. For example, instead of spending an hour planning, creating, and publishing one Instagram post, you’ll spend that hour writing or “batching” an entire week of posts in one go.
I time-block every Monday afternoon for content creation, which helps me get ahead of the game.
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