How to Make the Most of Your Content (and save yourself hours of time!)

When you are trying to wear all the hats in your business that ‘to do’ list can feel never ending. It’s pretty common to slip right into the doing mode to try and keep the wheels turning. But with a little forward planning and focus you can streamline some of those time consuming marketing tasks and stay on top of that to do list (and keep the stress levels down!) whilst you are still at the ‘DIY it’ stage in marketing your business.

We all know that providing engaging and useful content that is valuable to your customer is powerful in driving sales for your business, yet consistently coming up with ideas and producing that content can be extremely time consuming. 

That’s why the rise of popular AI tools such as ChatGPT and Bard are getting a lot of air time right now to help with content creation. Note: These tools are aids to help you more quickly form your  content structure and ideas but still need a human lens applied across them.

I’m all about looking at ways I can bring more efficiency into the way I work and developing more streamlined processes  so below are my top five tips to help you make the most of all that glorious content you are creating!

You don’t have to keep creating new content all of the time (in fact this very blog has just been revived and updated 🙂 

Don’t fall into the trap of always having to come up with new ideas. ‘Evergreen content’ is content that isn’t time sensitive and remains relevant and useful to your audience year after year. Consider the decision-making journey of your customer, depending on your business they may buy from you weekly or once in a lifetime and anywhere in between – this can give you clues as to how often you could simply repost existing content. In your business you will be consistently attracting new customers who won’t have seen any of your previous blogs, videos or social posts, yet will still find that info highly relevant – this will all be brand new content to them! Also remember, your existing customers also won’t have seen every piece of content you put out and if they have they may just take an action now that they may not have the first time they saw it or simply filter it out. It can take between 9-15 touchpoints with you business before a consumer takes an action therefore it’s perfectly fine to recycle the same content from time to time which leads me to the next tip…

Think about how you can repurpose your existing content into different formats across different platforms to use and then get into this habit for all the new content you produce

Think about how that blog post you wrote can work much harder – consider how you might turn it into an e-book or white paper, a video, a FB live, a webinar, an infographic, a podcast, a quote, a checklist or maybe a template. This can give you a huge amount of longevity from that cornerstone content and lots of ways to engage! Go through and do an audit of all your content and think about how you might reformat it. You may well find you have a treasure trove of content that you have been overlooking! Got any ‘how to’, product demos, profiles of you and your staff or behind the scenes content? Put yourself in your customers shoes, people like to buy from people and love to see ‘real stuff’ going on too.

Listen to your customers for content ideas, or even better ask them!

This is an underutilised method I see all the time in product-based businesses particularly and if coming up with topics is a struggle for you then this is a super easy way to get ideas! You can get a huge amount of inspiration simply by having conversations with your customers and listening to what their key pain points and problems are. Keep an eye out on what they are talking about on social channels, chat with them when you can face to face, be curious and ask questions. Conduct a survey or a poll or a fun quiz out to your database of customers and across your social channels to ask them what content they would like to see. Ask them for reviews of your business and use this to build out case studies, quotes and testimonials that you can use.

Batch the time you spend on creating and scheduling content

This is where a little focussed effort spent on planning can go a long, long way. Block out a few dedicated hours at a time and use a content calendar to map out what content you will post and where. Trello.com (there are many others also such as Asana or even on paper if that’s what works for you) is a fantastic free tool that I use to plan out my topics, formats and platforms to post on and depending on how organised you like to be you can plan weekly, monthly or quarterly. In my case I plan a months’ worth of content at a time in one block, then I batch produce two weeks worth at a time and pre-schedule it together using a publishing tool to drip feed the content out. Facebook has its own publishing tool feature and if you are using multiple platforms you can use tools like HubSpot or Hootsuite.

Providing dedicated time to this sort of task and batching it in this way means it’s off your plate to focus on other tasks eliminating that all too well known feeling of overwhelm whilst scrambling to come up with ideas to post ‘on the day’. Try it and see for yourself 😊

Track your best performing content and do more of that!

Spending a little time to go back through your social and website analytics to see what content has had the most engagement or driven tangible business results for your business will also give you insight into the topics that your customers want to be hearing more about.  You can use these insights to consider more longer form content, invite guests to provide content (in the form of interviews that could be formatted as podcasts or a written article) or provide guest content yourself (also beneficial for growing your database) These insights can help you align complimentary content themes your customers may also be interested in.

Using these tips and putting this into practise will save you hours of time each month and multiply the amount of useable content and formats you can create to engage with your customers.

If this is an area you would like some more help with why not book in a discovery call with us to see if we would be a good fit to work on developing your business marketing strategy together.  

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