Love making content around here for our clients and for ourselves at Adelsberg Marketing. Today, we want to think about how to generate that content. We also like to think about things in 90 days or one quarter timelines to work towards success. So let’s talk about how to make a plan for 90 days worth of content. So where do we start? Three keys to being successful. One, someone specifically assigned the responsibility of generating and distributing the content. How do having accountability for these things matters? Number two, a plan to succeed made ahead of time so that you can be ahead of the curve when you’re trying to make things. And then three, making it a priority by putting things on the schedule, on the calendar, to take time to make things and make reminders to post those things as well. So for this podcast, every Monday afternoon, I have a dedicated time set out to come in and recording this podcast. When we think about the particular pieces of content, we’re going to talk through the process that we would want you to think about when you’re making one piece of content. And you can repeat that process many times in almost like a Mad Lib type format.
The first step to think about is what makes you or your business unique. We love Post it Note exercises, and if you’re familiar with those, this is a great time to use one. But if not, think about the following. Number one, what competitive advantages do you have over others? For example, do you have access to certain products that other people don’t? Or do you have a specific expertise? Number two, does any of our people have a great personality online? So is there someone in your company who is super comfortable being online? And maybe it’s funny, which is obviously not the case with me. And then three, do you have any processes that are interesting to the general public? We have video shoots all the time, and behind the scenes shots are generally interesting to people. So this is also a great time to think about your brand personality. Is your brand very professional? Then setting a funny guy loose without any restrictions might be a problem. So keep that in mind as we move further down the path. Using notes from that list above, we can then start to look at how that interacts with our customers’ wants and needs.
So one, what do your customers care about? It’s that old sizzle or stake situation. Are the customers really buying this from you or are they wanting something else? Are they wanting the sizzle or are they wanting the stake? What do your customers need to know? What information do you want them to know about your business? So you have to balance both of those factors. And then three, what’s the customer’s level of awareness about your business? Do they know that you exist and they know that you need your product and they just need a reminder? Or they are at the very top of the funnel and they don’t know that you exist and they don’t know that they need your product. This will help determine what type of content you create. Because if someone doesn’t know anything about you, you have to take a different approach to it than if they are already familiar with your customer. This will help determine what type of content you create. This will help determine what type of content you create. If a customer doesn’t know who you are, they require a different set of information if they’re already familiar with you.
Now, let’s combine some of these things. Let’s take one, what makes us special, and one, our customer needs, and one, our customer awareness level. And then let’s add some content structures to make the ideas work. What emotions are we wanting to evoke? Happy, sad, angry, cool, shocked, or intrigued? And then maybe pick a content structure. So, like, announcement, community generated content, expert opinion, get to know you content, guides, holiday relevant things, how to, listicles. A listicle is a list plus an article. Memes, polls, questions to the community, quizzes, specials or discounts, or testimonials. So then let’s pick a content medium. So maybe it’s animation, maybe it’s audio, maybe it’s a PDF document that they can download, or a graphic, some interactive device or quiz, live video, photography, stories, text, or video. So combining the types of information we want to convey with different types of structures and mediums, we can create an amalgamation that will help our customers be more aware of us. Now, do this a bunch of times. I would recommend two to three times a week to get started and have that ready. Have a list of those, so let’s say 30 of them over a 90 day time period.
And then here’s where it gets really challenging is plot these out on a calendar. To help you be successful, plot these out starting far enough out that you have time to make the first couple before the deadline arrives. When you’re ahead of the gun on this, when you’re ahead of the curve on this, it’s going to allow you to actually be successful in doing this and helping you stay ahead of what you need to be doing. Now, this is totally an exercise you can do on yourself. But if you’re a larger organization, we can be hired to come in and do a content idea generation session with our entire team. So feel free to reach out if you’re interested in that. If you found this helpful or you might have a friend who would find this helpful, shoot them a text, let them know about it. It helps us get the word out and helps us make more episodes. So thank you for your time. I hope you enjoyed the Content Machine podcast. We’ll be back very soon with more awesome content.
